Toby sighed, shaking his head. "Believe me, it's different. I know." He shuddered, remembered the dozens of innocent people who had died in Mezquiriz. "Remember Jacques, at Montserrat, who tried to be a saint and failed that test? He started with an elementary, not a hob, and yet it became a demon." It had taken most of him with it when it was exorcised, and left a human cabbage. "Have you bedded her yet?"
"No!" Hamish glowered at the papers on the table.
"Do you plan to?"
Without looking up, Hamish mumbled, "You think I couldn't? If I wanted?"
"Sorry. Yes, she's lovely. If I give her sheepdog looks behind her back, then I'm sorry about that, too. I didn't know I was doing it. I probably ogle lots of women — didn't you tell me once that that was why men's heads could turn?" Briefly Toby considered ordering his chancellor to report to the camp brothel, but discretion prevailed. His troubles were too serious to cure that way. "Old friends should not squabble over a prize that neither of them can ever hope to win."
He ought to be more sympathetic. Things were easier for him, who was forever denied love. Time had dulled the pain of Jeanne and that terrible night in Mezquiriz, and yet he still dreamed of her sometimes. He wakened weeping.
"It does seem irrational." Hamish was too upset to smile. "It's the thought that she's going to have to marry someone, and probably very soon. Demons, Toby, I'm crazy about her! I've never felt like this about a woman, never. At times I want to burst out laughing, yelling, 'Lisa loves me!' so the whole world can know. And then I remember that some man is going to drag her off to bed to breed a pack of royal brats, and I want to kill myself. It's driving me insane! I can't eat or sleep or think straight." He pounded his fists on the table.
Man chooses woman, woman accepts man, society forbids the match — it happened all the time, but that made it no less tragic.
"Flea farts! You slept like a millstone last night. You're also doing the work of three men and managing to squire Lisa at the same time. Let's get started here. What have…" A flash of movement on the roof of the villa…
"What?" Hamish looked where Toby was looking.
"My keeper is back."
Hamish's eyes grew almost as wide as the owl's. It was a white owl, a large one, staring fixedly at them. "It's the same one. Can you hear drumming now?"
"No. Can you?"
"No."
This was new. Drumming with no owl, yes, but never owl without drumming.
Before Hamish could comment further, Don Ramon de Nuñez y Pardo came striding out of the villa with a couple of squires at his heels. He paused long enough to wave them away before advancing on the table like a stalking leopard. What would he say to tales of invisible drummers? He probably heard them all the time, and bugles, too. Toby and Hamish rose and bowed.
He sat down without inviting them to. He was even more resplendent than usual in a dazzling new military doublet that Toby had not seen before; he had his silver helmet on his head and carried his captain-general's baton. Although his blue eyes shone inhumanly bright, he did not seem especially mad this morning, neither angry nor crazy. Time would tell.
"I want an explanation for that scene yesterday! You told me that Marradi had put his villa at your disposal."
Toby met his glare squarely. "He did, senor. I suspect his sister bears me a grudge, and the problem is of her devising."
"The word in Florence is that the duchessa has sworn to have your hide for a rug and certain other parts of you as paperweights."
"I have done nothing to provoke her enmity."
"Obviously doing nothing was the trouble. Demons have no fury like a woman scorned, Constable." The don's smirk implied that he had not made the same mistake and his information had been collected firsthand, which was certainly possible.
Hamish was scrabbling in his papers. "A note arrived from Il Volpe this morning, Captain-General. He apologizes for the misunderstanding. The meeting may proceed at Cafaggiolo as planned."
All very fine, but a private apology would not begin to undo the damage of that very public snub.
"Typical republican stupidity!" said the don. "Never apologize, under any circumstances."
Hamish had not finished. "There is also a note from podestà Origo. He says that the prince has absolutely forbidden any meetings until he arrives in Florence. He does not say when that will be."
"Sometimes republicans don't seem so bad," Toby remarked glumly. "Does the idiot think the war will wait on his pleasure?"
After a tense silence, the don said, "Who was coming?"
Toby had been trying to keep the don and the proposed meeting well apart, but he could not refuse his nominal superior information when he asked for it, especially after the brilliant save the man had improvised in the loggia yesterday. He passed the question to Hamish.
"There was a letter in last night from Rome. The College will send Captain-General Villari. That's everyone we invited! Ercole Abonio from Milan — and he's bringing di Gramasci of the Black Lances. The Stiletto from Venice. Mezzo will come if his health improves; otherwise he'll send Gioberti or Desjardins."
The don raised aristocratic eyebrows. "Mezzo?"
"Paride Mezzo, collaterale of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies." No one but Hamish ever bothered to use that formal name for Naples. He just liked the sound of it. "We were about to invite the small guns: Verona, Bologna, Genoa—"
"Bah! They don't matter. They do what Milan and Venice and Florence tell them, and those three have no choice but to cooperate."
"They have some very competent soldiers," Toby protested.
"We do not need advice." From the don, that we was a remarkable concession, unless he had just taken to classifying himself as royalty. "The keys are Naples and Rome — Naples because it has the men, and Rome because it has the hierocracy for hexers. It also has to let the Neapolitans march through. Get those two into the coalition, and we may have a chance. At least we'll bloody the foe. The Swiss?"
"We can try. They're as biddable as cats."
"I assume that the real purpose of the orgy was to get you elected comandante?"
"Would be nice," Toby admitted. "But I do want to discuss strategy. We need to plan how to resist the invasion. We can't know where until we know which way Nevil's coming."
"Make up your mind, Constable. If you want to be elected jefe, then you bring in every little town that can field a pikeman. They'll all vote for you because Florence is less of a threat than any of the other four, but they'll never agree on anything else. If you need to decide whose crops are going to get burned, then you leave them out, all of them." Whatever illusions Don Ramon pursued, he was never stupid. He had a much better grasp of politics than he normally cared to admit.
"Another thing we must talk about is gramarye," Toby said. "We don't have a single hexer, and I've heard that the College is being absurdly uncooperative. If all the senior condottieri unite to appeal to Rome, then perhaps the hierocracy will bend a little."
"What need have you of hexers if you have one good shaman?"
Toby had registered Hamish's slack-jawed astonishment a split second before that new voice at his back spun him around.
A bizarre figure came limping across the courtyard toward them. It was short and completely enveloped in a floating costume of many colors and many parts — panels and swatches in green and brown and gray, bedecked with ribbons and lace, beads and embroidery, bunches of feathers and wisps of grass, a design that was either completely random or fraught with great meaning. Some parts of it looked new, others were grubby and worn by many years of use. The dainty, pointed chin suggested a woman, but she might be a young girl, or even a boy. Her hair and the upper part of her face were hidden by a blindfold and an elaborate headdress. Around her neck hung a drum as large as a meal sieve, which she steadied against her hip with one small brown hand.