The Spirit Lens (63 page)

I stared at the telling bead and again at the dark stain in the center of Dante’s ring. So he had worked a
vitet
, a vital spell, an enchantment that incorporated blood as a particle—or in Dante’s case, one that incorporated the blood’s keirna in the pattern he wove. Vitets were not illicit, as long as the blood was freely given to the practitioner, but they were as complex and unstable as human souls. Theory suggested this particularly affected the one whose blood was used.

A void yawned in my belly. My fingers rubbed my chest, where crosshatched scars reminded me of pain, blood, and smoke. The Aspirant still had the half litre of blood he had taken from me.
This
blood could not be mine . . . surely . . . else Dante . . .

The tower bell pealed the quarter before eleventh hour, shaking me out of my paralysis. Father Creator! I sped through the Great Hall and snatched up the bundle of clothes I had stashed at my desk early that morning. Shedding my
agente confide
’s responsibilities and my disturbing memories for a task that supported no delay, I charged out into the night.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

25 CINQ THE ANNIVERSARY

A
s I traversed the open arcades, courtyards, and broad stairs of the palace and the upper city, the Rotunda’s oppressive anxiety faded. No longer did I have the sense that at any moment I would bump into something I couldn’t see. Yet my perceptions remained in their altered state—as if all my senses had been given spectacles to remove the world’s blurred edges.

Lamplight glinted through the seams of doors and shutters and winked like fireflies. Laughter and music from taverns shimmered on the air like bronze bells. The darkest, quietest alleyways were redolent with scent—yesterday’s fish, smoked pork fat, wood shavings, forged iron, an overflowing midden, tansy growing in the seams of old walls—not a hodgepodge “stench of the city,” but each scent distinct in itself, pleasant or not as its nature and my appreciation prescribed. My perceptions gave me an extraordinary confidence. By the Souleater’s Worm, the villains would not count Maura among their victims.

No one must see me in the next hour, at least not to remember, so I kept to Riverside’s back streets, well away from the Market Way that led from the heart of the upper city to the harbor. A golden haze swelled over the rooftops—torches blooming along the wide boulevard to light the way for the king. Rumors would be flying.

A dull thud rattled the shutters along the lane and set the dogs howling. White fire blossomed over the river, a cascade of light as if the stars were melting.
Not yet!
I needed to be at the harbor, as near the main pier as I could get before the turn of middle-night.

No further bursts occurred. The Lestarte brothers must only have been testing their launchers. I slipped into a darkened warehouse that smelled of new cut oak, char, and pitch. Inside, dangling his feet from a cooper’s wagon bed, waited Calvino de Santo.

The disgraced guard captain had been more than willing to aid in this night’s work. I had warned him his actions would be viewed as conspiracy to treason, but he relished the chance to save another pawn from a fate so like his own.

“So it is tonight,” he said, returning the brass token I’d left him in a palace alleyway.

“He sent the release order.” I kept a wary eye out the doorway. “No one challenged your leaving?”

“My night’s taskmaster believes something I ate gave me heaves. I offered him good proof. The gate guards are so accustomed to my skulking about all night, they never noticed me walk out. I’ll walk back in when we’re done. I’ve a thought where to take the lady. I know summat—”

“No! You mustn’t tell me.” My skin popped out in gooseflesh. “If I’m arrested, I must not be able to reveal her destination. I’d take her myself and damn all, save I must be here to bring de Vernase to trial.”

“Skin your worry, sonjeur. Under an hour and I’ll pass her to someone reliable. None’ll be able to get her destination from me, neither.”

We confirmed positions and timing, and I left him. Riverside residents flooded the streets, pointing to the sky over the river. Some brought torches or lanterns to light their way home. Some paraded with pipes and tabors, as if this were the grape harvest festival or a frost fair on midwinter’s night.

I pulled a black cloak from my bag and donned one of Ilario’s out-of-fashion hats, expensive enough to name me respectable, old enough to bear no connection to Ilario, and wide enough to shield my face from easy view. As I neared the river, I angled through the steep lanes toward the remote slip where Massimo Haile’s barge had been moored on the day of the
Swan
fire. No one had used it since that ill-omened day.

The tower bells told the second quarter of eleventh hour, as I scrambled down the muddy bank, tucked in between the old planks and water’s edge, and drew the voluminous cloak over my entire self. When the Guard Royale set their protective perimeter around the harbor, I would already be inside it.

The half hour stretched long and anxious in the pitch dark, my every sense twisted to extremity. Cold mud crept into boots and breeches. My mind worried at the earthenware vial and its telltale drop of blood, pawing through evidence—conversations, dates, and times. I longed for light to consult my journal. My conclusion did not change: Dante could not be the Aspirant. Even the thought, dismissed, appalled and terrified me. No matter passing doubts, no matter his erratic behavior, I refused to believe Dante was bent.

When the tower bells rang middle-night, I poked my head from my shroud and gratefully shed every consideration but the present venture. White, gold, vermillion, and emerald fire seared the night sky all up and down the river. No kingdom in the world could produce the intense colors of Sabrian fireworks. Magic, some called it, though I knew our alchemists had found the secret in their minerals. I crept out from my hiding place and straightened my borrowed hat. Another burst of mixed yellow and green provided a springlike bower of light for the shallop emerging from the Spindle’s water gate.

Boots squelching, I scuttered along the steep bank toward the central harbor. When the bank began to flatten and voices murmured nearby, I assumed a drunkard’s meandering gait.

With a fierce satisfaction, I noted some two hundred courtiers gathered at the pier. Outside the ring of the Guard Royale, a thousand or more citizens of Merona trilled their pipes, thumped their tabors, and set up howls and cheers at each burst of colored fire.

Wandering up the bank, I waved at no one in particular and fumbled with my breeches, as if I’d relieved myself at the riverside. Unnecessary playacting. The guards faced outward toward the common mob, and the eyes of the courtiers were fixed on the approaching shallop or on the wharfside street above the mudflats where blazing torchlight illumined the waiting King of Sabria.

The heavy night breeze flapped pennons and shifted cloaks. I forced myself to breathe as the rowers shipped oars and glided the last metres into the pier, tossing lines to those on shore.

Liveried dockhands assisted the flock of ladies, fifteen or twenty of them indistinguishable in dark, hooded cloaks, onto the wide pier. The queen, regal in her pale cloak and gown, glittering with diamonds and rubies, stepped out of the shallop last. Every eye was drawn to her.

A lanky man in emerald satin burst free of the waiting nobles and into the chattering cluster of gentlewomen as they walked up the pier. He embraced each of the brave attendants in turn, swinging her round in exuberance, as his great cloak filled like green wings. Ilario.

Rebecs, shawms, and pipes spun a wild and merry gigue, and the crowd erupted in disbelieving laughter as Ilario danced with the ladies along the pier and muddy bank. When the chevalier bellowed at other men to join in the celebration, a goodly number did so.

Reluctant to involve him in our risk, I had not asked Ilario to create such a distraction, but I blessed it. With all eyes at the center, no one noticed when another fellow—I—in black cloak and gray hat, embraced one of the queen’s dark-cloaked ladies and danced her away from the new arrivals and into the crowd of dignitaries.

I’d never felt such an embrace—the softness I had imagined the first time I’d seen her, the desperate thanks, the radiant affection that her great eyes spoke with my name. “Dear, kind Portier.”

I swept my voluminous cloak about her. “Switch cloaks with the one in my bag.” I whispered. “Quickly, as we dance.”

In the press of the crowd, it was unlikely that anyone noted that the gray hat was swept from my head and trampled underfoot, or that when I released the lady from my enveloping embrace, she wore a hooded summer cloak of bright blue. On this night, the brighter color was the better disguise—Eugenie’s own suggestion. By the time Ilario released the laughing gentlewomen, and they strung out along the boardwalk laid across the mudflats from pier to wharfside, no one pointed out that there were fewer ladies by one than had been rowed out of the Spindle.

Maura and I ambled up the boardwalk with the rest of the queen’s guests. Two sobering, solid lines of the Guard Royale flanked our path, holding back the raucous mob. Maura shook so violently that I feared someone would notice. But I gripped her tight and babbled noisily of kings and queens and the ridiculous Chevalier de Sylvae, and bent down to kiss her once—which was entirely foolish, but seemed to calm her at the least. Her lips were cold as Journian frost.

At last Eugenie, too, stepped onto Sabria’s shore. Ilario bent his knee before her. She raised him into a long embrace, but sent him on and walked up the long path from the pier alone. At last, beneath the blazing torches, she knelt gracefully before her king. To the cheers and wonder of the citizens who’d come to the riverside thinking to see only fireworks, Philippe raised her up and bowed before her in turn, greeting her not as a prisoner indulged, but as Sabria’s rightful queen.

Only as the royal couple strolled hand in hand down the wharfside toward Market Way did some sharp-eyed observer point out the orange flares spit up from Spindle Prison. Almost lost in the fireworks, the warning of a prisoner’s escape caused only murmurs at first.
But the queen’s released . . . king’s come to fetch her . . . other prisoners? . . . There, look, another flare!

More serious shouts soon followed. As Maura and I mingled with the protected elite on the wharfside way, guardsmen spread quickly down the shoreline all the way to Massimo Haile’s slip.

I blessed my guiding angels that I had not followed my first instinct to get Maura out of the crowd quickly and go back the way I’d come. Unfortunately, the second line of guardsmen constricted about our party of courtiers. Of a sudden, my plan to slip quietly into tiny, dark Fish Lane where Calvino de Santo waited seemed incredibly naive.

The royal couple, oblivious to the rising disturbance, mounted their waiting horses, as did Lady Antonia and Ilario, who waved his feathered hat and blew kisses at every person wearing skirts and some who didn’t. Philippe’s bodyguards encircled the four and escorted them on a slow progress up the boulevard. The rest of us, including the queen’s ladies, were held back by the orders of Captain de Segur, the very captain I’d sworn to obedience beside Edmond’s body. Cursing fortune and my discarded hat, I ducked my head.

The captain dispatched searchers into the dockside lanes, then climbed atop a cart to address the restive party. “Honorable ladies and noble gentlemen, one moment please,” he bellowed. “We’ve signs that a prisoner has taken advantage of this happy occasion to escape the Spindle. For your protection, we ask you to remain here. We’ll escort you to your conveyances a few at a time. . . .”

“Portier, move away from me,” Maura whispered.

I gripped her hand the harder and scoured our surroundings for a way out. My anxiety was not at all soothed by the sight of another boat lamp halfway across the strait between the Spindle and the shore. Once the boat landed, Captain de Segur would know exactly for whom he was looking.

A soldier burst from one of the steep side lanes and ran to the captain for a hurried conference. My heart lurched as the captain’s sharp eyes roved our party of anxious nobility and lit on me. “Sonjeur de Duplais! Please join me here.”

“Fish Lane,” I said softly, ducking my head in the captain’s direction. “Ten houses in. As soon as you’re free to go.” I squeezed her hand and dropped the bag containing her black cloak.

Spirit aching at abandoning Maura, I pushed through the grumbling party. “What is it, Captain? I’ve duties.”

He jumped down from his perch. “Fortunate you’re here. We’ve found the fugitive.”

It required every bit of discipline I possessed to refrain from looking over my shoulder. “Indeed?”

“The sorcerer was hiding on a balcony overlooking Market Way, exactly where the king was to pass. We need you to identify him.”

“A sorcerer . . . Fedrigo!” I spluttered, relieved and astounded. “But I thought—”

My racing mind shifted tactics. Captain de Segur surely realized that Adept Fedrigo was unlikely to be the prisoner escaped from the Spindle, but he couldn’t be certain until the boat landed. And without doubt the noblemen and ladies surrounding us were entirely unused to standing in the damp wind surrounded by soldiers. They were ready to mutiny.

“Well, heavenly legions, that’s excellent, a fine job!” I shouted, slapping the captain on the shoulder. “Certainly, I’ll come with you. Now the fugitive is found, we can allow His Majesty’s friends to be on their way unhindered. Bravo! His Majesty will be delighted.”

No more than that was required to stir the prickly aristocrats. They began to clamor as one and push through the ring of guards. Only a few hours had passed since I was issuing orders under the king’s authority. De Segur had little choice but to follow my lead. The captain ordered his men to release the guests to proceed home as they would.