"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."
"Thank you, Madonna," he said earnestly.
Fiametta's lip curled in suspicion. "Don't you dare mock me!"
He opened his mouth, closed it, then settled on that same safely stupid friendly smile he'd favored her with when she'd threatened him with the chamber pot. She realized she was shivering violently, her thin linen rippling in the night breeze.
The maids in the loggia were awake, crying and praying. An uproar almost equal to the one following Catti's stabbing spread from them through the inn, till three-fourths of its occupants were roused. By the time the story of the ghostly apparition had been told and retold by those who'd seen to those who hadn't, gaining drama, Madonna Catti was in despair.
"This will ruin my business!"
"I doubt hell be back," said Fiametta through her teeth.
"I'll call for the priest, and get my smokehouse exorcised!"
"What, that same priest you couldn't afford to have bury him?"
The two women exchanged tight-lipped frowns. The maids babbled hysterical nonsense. Tich was loudly irate that no one had wakened him to see the show. Fiametta went back to her cold bedroll and pulled the pillow over her head. No one dared approach her.
The interminable night gave way at last to a foggy pinkish-orange dawn, Fiametta's head throbbed vilely, her mouth felt full of fustian, and her eyelids scratched like sand. She dragged on her ruined velvet overdress. She wanted nothing more than to be gone from this place, the sooner the better.
At least Thur made no demur or delay. Dressed already, he had his bedding rolled and packed within a minute of his rising out of it. They sat on the benches in the tap room and washed down a breakfast of dry bread with ale. Catching the white horse from the pasture proved to be the greatest obstacle to their quick start. The innkeeper's wife, after watching them lunge through the dew-wet grass after it for several minutes, shook her head and came out with a basin of oats to entice it, and bridled it herself. She handed the reins to Thur, who handed them to Fiametta.
"Can't you ride a horse?" Fiametta demanded of her would-be cavalier.
He shook his head. "My mother only kept a few goats. We couldn't afford a cow, still less a horse." He added after an uneasy moment, "I could lead you on it, though. Like the mules."
"Well ... all right," Fiametta said doubtfully. She stood beside the animal, her nose level with its withers. "Lead it to the fence, and I'll climb on."
"Oh, that's easy," said Thur. He picked her up around the waist and popped her aboard as if she'd been a three-year-old. At her outraged look, he added apologetically, "You're much lighter than an ox hide full of rocks, Madonna Beneforte."
She wrestled her skirts around her legs, wedged Thur's pack in front of her, took up a handful of long greasy mane, swallowed, and nodded. "Lead on, then.
The white horse was loathe to leave the green pasture, but once out on the road seemed to become reconciled to its fate, and plodded on beside the Swiss. Madonna Catti watched them out of sight, as if to make certain they and their bad luck were really departing. The early morning light was level and golden, setting the lingering wisps of mist ablaze in the meadows, casting knife-dark shadows across their feet from the poplar and cypress trees along the road. The damp warming air was redolent with spring flowers, and with the green scent of the little rocky streams that crossed the road as it dipped into shaded dells, then climbed again. The sun and the horse's warm back began to drive the night's chill from Fiametta's bones. If she weren't so tired and aching, the ride would have been pleasant.
Thur strode along easily beside the horse, petting it encouragingly on the neck now and then. He at least seemed no worse worn for the night's disruptions. He glanced over his shoulder at Fiametta, as they crested a little hill.
"Your father said Monreale. You called him the Abbot—is he the same as the Bishop Monreale my brother mentioned sometimes in his letters?"
"Yes, there's only one of him. Except unlike the Roman bishops, he actually serves both of the benefices he holds, Papa says. Said. Abbot Monreale's father was a Savoyard nobleman who married a Lombard lady. Monreale was a younger son, so he went off to seek his fortune as a captain in the armies of France, back when they drove the English from Bordeaux. Your brother Uri used to like to get him to talk about it, and it was never too hard to persuade him to reminisce, though he pretends to be ashamed of it now. Monreale kept trying to persuade Uri that he'd be better off turning monk himself, and serving God instead of Duke Sandrino. It got to be a kind of running joke between them, except that it wasn't quite a joke." Fiametta bit her lip. It was no joke now, that was certain.
"Papa and the Abbot were gossips, somewhat. At first because of their being the two best magicians in Montefoglia, I suppose, and Papa of course had to stay on Monreale's good side to get his ecclesiastical license from Monreale as Bishop. But I think they really liked each other. When Monreale came to town to the cathedral to tend to the affairs of the Diocese, they would sometimes sit in our courtyard and drink wine and talk. And sometimes they would go fishing together on the lake. Papa was more practical, wanting to master material magic. Monreale was more interested in the theory of sorcery, with an eye to his spiritual duties about it, I suppose. Sometimes Papa would go to him for ideas, when he was stuck working out a new spell. Monreale must know about spirit-magic, he'd have to study it to fight it, at least."