The Spirit Ring

Chapter Fourteen

"There goes the last of them," said Brother Perotto grimly. A blaze of orange light evaporated from the surface of the parchment tambourine on the table before him. The haze flickered uncertainly in the cool northern daylight of Abbot Monreale's work chamber, and was gone.

"All that work," moaned Brother Ambrose. The other monks ringing the table, each clutching a now-silenced mouth, grimaced in agreement. Fiametta fingered the last tambourine, before her place. Dead. It had never even started to speak, but now its magic aura was not merely inactive, it was gone without trace. Where are you, Thur?

Fiametta had just turned over to Monreale the mouth speaking, alternately clear and strangely muffled, from Lady Pia's sleeve, when it had emitted a cry and cut off abruptly. Monreale had hastily gathered his other listeners together to follow Vitelli's destructive progress through the castle; Sandrino's office, the infirmary, the groom's dormitory. The words the little mouths emitted before going dead had been few and businesslike: "Here's another, my lord." "Under the blanket. Ha!" Till the last, damning one, found on its shelf in the chamber of necromancy. Fiametta understood that mouth had kept Brother Perotto tinglingly awake last night even after she had gone to bed by Monreale's orders, but Perotto had been maddenly vague about the events it had reported, at least to her. Vitelli's last whispered message had been brief and horrible. "It is you, Monreale, isn't it? I recognize your style. It's done you no good. Your fate is sealed, and your stupid spy shall die directly." A crackling, cut off, and the mouth in front of Brother Perotto had given up its so-painstakingly-invested magic.

Monreale sat bent over, pale, as if pieces were being torn bit by bit from his belly. Brother Perotto sat back, and turned his palms out in helpless frustration. "What happened, Father? It seemed to be going so well, and then ..."

"I greatly fear for poor Thur," said Monreale lowly into his lap.

Fiametta wrapped her arms around her torso, pressing the lion ring secretly between her breasts. She could still sense its warm, musical hum, its tiny heartbeat. If Thur's real heart stopped, would she know? She stared around the table at the array of gray-cowled men, solemn, authoritative, and helpless. "What's the use of you?" she demanded in sudden anguish.

"What?" said Brother Ambrose sharply, though Abbot Monreale merely looked up.

"What's the use of you? The Church is supposed to be our defense against evil. Oh, you ride about the countryside, terrorizing old hedge-witches about a plague of lice in their neighbor's hair or some stupid love potion which half the time doesn't work anyway, and threatening their souls with hellfire if they don't cease and desist, you're fine at pestering men at work in their shops, but when real evil comes, what good are you? You're too afraid to fight it! You persecute the little crimes of little people, that's safe enough, but when great crimes march in with an army at their backs, where is all your preaching then? Strangely silent! Great stupid louts of—of boys—are hanged while you sit and pray... ." Tears were running down the inside of her nose, and she sniffed mightily, wiped her sleeve across her face, and bit her lip. "Oh, what's the use...."

Brother Perotto began an angry lecture on the proper humility due from ignorant girls, but Abbot Monreale waved him to silence.

"Fiametta is partly right," he said in a distant tone, then looked around the table and smiled bleakly. "All virtues come down to courage, at the sharp end of the sword. But courage must be tempered by prudence. Courage wasted by misdirection is the most heartbreaking of all tragedies. If there is an eighth deadly sin, it ought to be stupidity, by which all virtues are run out into dry sands. Yet ... where does prudence end and cowardice begin?"

"You sent Thur in there alone," said Fiametta breathlessly, "to confirm my charges of black magic and murder. Since my ignorant girl's word was not good enough against so great and virtuous a lord as Uberto Ferrante. Now my charges and much more are confirmed, through their own mouths. What do you wait for now? There is no reason to wait, and every reason to hurry!"

Monreale laid his hands out flat, palms down, upon his worktable, and regarded them gravely. "Quite." He sucked a little air through his teeth, then said, "Brother Ambrose, fetch the prior and the lieutenant of Sandrino's guards. Brother Perotto, Fiametta, you shall assist me. Begin by clearing all the rubbish from my table."

For all her passionate plea for action, Fiametta was taken aback by this sudden response. Her belly fluttered with fear as she busied herself scurrying around the chamber putting away, ordering, and fetching the objects of his art at Monreale's over-the-shoulder directions. Monreale was prepared, mentally at least; apparently all that time in meditation had been spent on more than prayer. When the lieutenant of the refugee Montefoglian guards arrived, Monreale sat him down with a map of the town and exact instructions for coordinating their magical and military efforts.

The ring of Losimon besiegers encircling Saint Jerome was known to be thin. Monreale urged the Montefoglian guards to leave just enough crossbowmen to keep the enemy away from the walls, and, breaking through the ring, make a sally toward town. With Ferrante and Vitelli incapacitated by the spell he planned to cast, and in the face of this sudden attack, Monreale hoped the Losimon troops would be thrown into confusion. Sandrino's—now Ascanio's—men could then rouse the townsfolk to their support.

"The Losimons have made themselves odious enough," Monreale judged. "All our people need is some real hope of success, to quell their fears of reprisal, and they will pour into the streets for you. Drive all the way through to the castle and the Duchess on the first rush, if you can. Though with their leaders gone, the Losimons might be willing to surrender on terms even from behind sealed gates."

Fiametta grew chill, listening to this. Well, Ferrante's Losimon bravos were ruthless, but perhaps their loyalty did not run to self-sacrifice. They wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice others, though. The complexity of the military situation daunted her heart. There was more to fighting their way out of this monstrous coil than merely waving a magic wand. Yet if anyone could pull all the disparate threads together, it was surely Abbot Monreale. Even Papa had called on him.

Monreale blessed his empty worktable while Brother Ambrose, chanting, circled the chamber with a thurible dribbling incense smoke. "To clear away the lingering echoes of previous spells," Ambrose explained. Fiametta nodded; her father had practiced a similar sort of housecleaning now and then, before casting particularly important, delicate, or complex commissions. Or ones of which he was not too sure of the outcome. The ritual seemed to order the mind more than it did the room, Fiametta reflected, coughing in the smoke.

Monreale himself laid out the props of his intended spell. "It is to be a spell of spirit over spirit as much as spirit over matter. The symbols must be chosen correctly to concentrate the mind. Still, I could wish for some material connector. A lock of hair, an article of clothing actually worn.... I might as well wish for the Papal army to appear over the hill while I'm at it." He sighed, then brightened. "Still, I have Vitelli's true name. This would have miscarried for certain without it, and I would not have known why." He took a new stick of white chalk, and began to laboriously trace a diagram upon the tabletop.

When he'd finished the chalk pattern, Monreale laid a knife with green and gold thread tied around it parallel to a wand of dry willow circled with threads of red and black. Ferrante and Vitelli, the soldier and the spiritually sapless mage. Monreale stood back and studied them. "Is it enough ... ? Such a distance we must carry, over a mile."

They should be crossed, upside down, to represent their entanglement and their evil, thought Fiametta, but did not speak. Her father had severely chastised her for daring to offer suggestions in public. Surety Monreale knew even more about what he was doing.

Monreale folded a gauze cloth beside the knife and wand. It was actually a piece of cheesecloth fetched from the monastery kitchen. "Silk would be better," Monreale muttered. "But at least it is new."

Spider-silk would be even better, Fiametta thought, but she quailed at the thought of volunteering to go collect some, though there were plenty of odd corners in the monastery where spiders might be obtained. Very odd corners.

"It will be a spell of deep sleep," Monreale explained, "the same basic spell as that used by our healers, when a patient fears some little surgery. Powerful enough, but we must strive to make it more powerful, to overcome two men at once, neither anxious to cooperate and one fully capable of the most strenuous resistance. And he may have set wards ..."

Why not enspell them one at a time? Vitelli first, of course.

"My greatest worry," Monreale muttered, "is to this spell's quality of whiteness, or spiritual benignity. It's very doubtful."

"What," said Fiametta, "why? It won't kill them— unless one is leaning over a balcony as it strikes, which seems unlikely—it won't even hurt them. They just go to sleep. A healer's spell, what could be whiter?"

Monreale's lip twisted. "And in the end—if we win—both men must eventually burn at the stake. Hardly harmless in intent, even if legal in means."

"If they win, are they even likely to bother with legality?"

"To hold what they have taken, they must wrap their crimes in some cloak of public pretense. Eyewitnesses to the contrary will be ... in very grave straits."

"That includes me," Fiametta realized with a shiver.

"It includes enough by now to guarantee a very massacre." Monreale sighed. "Well, I am ready. Until the lieutenant reports his men assembled, let us compose ourselves in prayer."

I might have predicted that. But Fiametta settled herself upon her knees before the crucifix on Monreale's office wall without demur. She did not lack things to pray about. She thought sadly of all the prayers she'd wasted in the past on her small desires ... a lace cap, a silver bracelet like Maddelena's, a pony ... a husband. Yet, in a backhanded way, all had been forthcoming; the cap and the bracelet from Papa, the white horse ... Thur? What was this strange girl-power, to make the intractable world spit forth her wishes? Ok; I wish it were over.

At length, Sandrino's surviving senior officer returned, to confer briefly with Monreale. The soldier's eyes glinted grimly in the shadow of his steel helmet. His dented breastplate was dull and leaden. More determination than enthusiasm tightened his jaw, but perhaps that was the more durable emotion, under fire. The ten-year-old Duke's offer to lead his troops himself had been tactfully turned down, the lieutenant reported; but the man's spine seemed to stiffen in memory of it. Monreale blessed him and sent him on his way with a slap to his cuirass that echoed hollowly in the plastered office.

Monreale then led Perotto, Ambrose, and Fiametta into his workroom. The prior followed as a witness. The prior was more an administrator than magician or healer or even, Fiametta suspected, monk, but he had been Monreale's practical right hand throughout the crisis, managing men and space and the daily bread.

Monreale arranged his brothers standing around the table laden with the simple set for the spell. He bent his head in one more blessedly brief prayer, and extended his right hand to Ambrose and his left to Perotto. "Brothers, lend me your strength."

Fiametta stepped to the table's fourth side. "Father, I will gladly lend mine."

Monreale frowned, his brow furrowing. "No ... no," he said slowly. "I don't want you exposed to the danger of the backlash, if this effort fails."

"My little mite could be the difference between failure and success. And not such a little mite as all that, either!"

Monreale smiled sadly, though Brother Perotto frowned repellingly. "You are a good girl, Fiametta," said Monreale. "But no. Please do not distract me further."

His raised palm blocked her protest, which she swallowed back into her tight throat. She stepped, away from the table to the prior's side, and locked her hands behind her back.

"Ambrose, Perotto, join hands," Monreale instructed, and they reached across to each other to complete the ring. Monreale's grip tightened. "The first strike requires all our hearts, to overwhelm Sprenger." He bent his gaze to the symbols on the table, knife and wand, and began to chant in a healer's low drone.

Fiametta could feel the power build, as if an invisible sphere were forming above the table. Monreale's control seemed very precise, meticulous, almost finicky, compared to her Papa's flowing, sweeping gestures. Monreale wastes nothing. And yet ... his economy wasted time, and attention, it seemed to Fiametta. Abundance can afford to be daring.

The sphere began to glow with a visible, corruscating white fire, shimmering in waves both upon its surface and within its heart, as its power built up and up. Now, that was wasteful. Papa had always insisted that a properly cast spell should be heatless and invisible. Perhaps it was some inevitable friction from trying to combine strengths from Ambrose and Perotto. Fiametta held her breath. Oh, strike now, or Vitelli will feel it and be warned!

Still Monreale held his hand, building up his power. The lacy sphere cast the monks' shadows on the walls. Then the light began to pour down like water into the vessels of knife and wand. They filled; the knife blade gleamed like moonlight. Soundlessly, the gauze lifted and drifted across the two glowing objects, and settled gently over them.

Monreale's eyes opened; he breathed the last syllable of his chant. Ambrose grinned in triumph, and even surly Perotto's eyes lighted. Monreale inhaled, smiling, to speak.

The dry willow wand exploded into flame, which flashed across the gauze, consuming it to crumbling blackness. White fire tainted with red flared up into Monreale's face like a powder flash from a misfired hand cannon. His features, lit from below, contorted. Red and green afterimages swirled in Fiametta's eyes, and she squinted futilely against them, her hands pressed to her mouth to stifle her scream.

Monreale's eyes rolled back, and he fell, unaided, since Ambrose's hands were clapped to his eyes and Perotto, too, was toppling. Monreale's forehead cracked the table as he collapsed. All three men's faces were reddening from the burn.

Fiametta and the prior jostled each other in their rush around the table. The prior knelt beside Monreale's bleeding head, but hesitated to touch him, still fearful perhaps of being guilty of interrupting some magic in progress. But there was nothing left to interrupt. Fiametta could feel it. The circle and the spell were broken.

"Father Monreale? Father Monreale!" cried the prior in anxiety. Monreale's face was dead white, mottled with red patches. His singed eyebrows came off an acrid whiff of burned hair. Overcoming his hesitation, the prior pressed his ear to Monreale's robed chest. "I hear nothing...."

Fiametta ran to the cupboard and snatched up a fragment of broken mirror stored there, and thrust it under Monreale's nose. "It clouds. He breathes...."

Perotto moaned; Ambrose lay as oddly as his abbot.

"What happened?" asked the prior. "Did Vitelli counterattack them somehow?"

"Yes, but... Vitelli's counter-surge might have been contained. Should have been contained. It was the excess heat, and the tinder-dryness of the willow. Abbot Monreale let too much heat build up."

The prior frowned at this critique, and wiped the blood away from the rising lump on Monreale's forehead. He palpated the skull. "Not broken, I think. He should come around soon."

"I don't think so." It wasn't just the crack on his head that was incapacitating Monreale. It was the spell, turned back on its source; she wasn't sure how Vitelli was doing it, but it was almost as if she could see a dark hand pressed to Monreale's face, as a man might hold his enemy under water. Strange. She shook her head to clear it of the ghostly impressions. She'd been steeped in too much magic of late, it was as if her senses for it had been sanded to an almost painful new receptivity. Maybe Ambrose could lift the spell hand, when he recovered. If he recovered.

Brother Perotto sat up on his own. Brother Ambrose's eyes opened at last, but he was dazed and incoherent. After another moment of uncertain observation, the prior ran to fetch the senior Healer, Brother Mario. The healer directed several more monks to gather up the stricken men and take them to their beds. Fiametta waited for Mario to ask her what had happened, but he didn't, so she tried to tell him.

"You!" Perotto, supported between two brothers, turned on her. "You ruined the spell. You don't belong in here!"

"Me! Abbot Monreale ordered me to be here!" said Fiametta.

"Impure ...," moaned Perotto.

Fiametta drew up indignation. "How dare you! I am a virgin!"

Mores the pity. And doomed to remain so, for all the rescue Thur seemed likely to receive now. At least until the Losimon soldiers took the monastery by storm. Ought she to suicide, before Saint Jerome was overrun? But that way lay damnation, too. Her heart burned in rage, and outrage. Why should she have to the and be damned for the crimes of men? She would rather fight, claw, and run away from the dismal fate of women and orphans.

The prior took her by the arm and steered her out onto the gallery overlooking the cloister. "Yes, yes, he meant no insult. But truly, it is improper for you to be in this part of the building. Go back to the women's quarters, Fiametta, and stay there."

"Till when? Till the Losimons come over the walls?"

"If the Abbot does not regain his senses from that knock soon ..." The prior licked dry lips.

"He is enspelled. He won't come round until the spell is lifted. It must be possible to determine how to lift it. Vitelli labors under the same disadvantages of distance as we do."

"I will have the healers do what they can."

"It will take more than a healer!"

"Be that as it may, healers are what we have left, unless Ambrose recovers first."

"What will you do if neither man recovers soon? Or at all?"

The prior's shoulders bent, as the full weight of Monreale's burdens seemed to fall on them. "I will... I will wait the night. Perhaps the morning will bring better counsel. But if Ferrante's emissary returns to plague us again ... perhaps it would be better to surrender on terms. Before it is too late."

"To Ferrante? You think he would honor his terms for five breaths?" cried Fiametta.

The prior's hands made impotent fists, by his sides. "Go back to the women's quarters, Fiametta! You understand not the first principle of the affairs of men!"

"What first principle? Save your own head, and let the devil take the hindmost? I understand that very well, thank you!"

"Go to—" the prior began to roar, then dropped his voice to hiss between clenched teeth, "Go to your quarters! And hold your tongue!"

"Will you at least let me try to lift the spell of sleep, if the healers fail?" Fiametta begged desperately.

"Perotto is right. You do not belong in here. Go to!"

In a moment, he would beat her in his frustration, and call it a just chastisement; Fiametta could see it coming. She bared her teeth at him and ducked away, and stalked stiff-backed out of the cloister. She should have kept silence. She should have spoken up. She should have ... she should have ...

In the women's quarters, two children were puking, three were crying, and a sharp argument between two mothers over the last of the clean swaddling cloths had degenerated into hair-pulling and shrieking. Fiametta fled again. Her attempt to see Abbot Monreale in the infirmary was turned back sternly by Brother Mario. A Montefoglian guard in the refectory tried to squeeze her breast, in passing, and whispered a lewd jest into her ear as she twisted away from him. The old lay sister in charge, capped and kirtled, gave him a box on the ear and a sharp rebuke, invoking his mother by name. He fell back, grinning and holding his nose, as Fiametta dove into the chaotic, infant-squalling, voracious sanctuary of the women's dormitory.

She flung herself down upon her pile of straw, and burrowed her face into it, her teeth gritted against tears. A stick poked into her neck, and a flea jumped upon her sleeve and then into her hair before she could crush it. Turning over, she was elbowed by the girl next to her.

"Keep to your own side, blackamoor!" The girl's snarl was angry, but her pale face was furrowed with suppressed grief and fear. Strained with the waiting, along with the rest, to be murdered.

Fiametta almost set her hair afire with a word. She clamped her lips on the heat boiling off her tongue, and curled in a tight ball, trembling. In the practice of magic, Monreale had said, you will be exposed to temptations that do not trouble the ignorant. Indeed. Yet what of the spell embodied in her silver snake belt, still concealed under her velvet bodice? Its effect had been far from benign, though it fell short of lethal. Had her Papa allowed himself to be just a little bit damned after all, as the price of his magic? If he could do it, why couldn't she?

Mother Mary, keep me from harm. At Monreale's order Fiametta had prayed to the Virgin for patience, settling to the pavement in the chapel and arranging her skirts and gazing up earnestly at the serene white marble face of the statue holding the Child. Patience was apparently another one of those women's virtues, for she could not recall it as ever being one of Papa's. Fiametta's eyes fell now on that same velvet skirt, bunched in her fist, stained and tattered. Mother Mary ... Mama, who were you?

This red dress was less faded than the fragmented images in Fiametta's mind of the woman who had first worn it. Her mother had died when Fiametta was eight, in Rome, of the fever that had carried off so many. A bad year, and August had been its worst month, with hard times upon them, Papa imprisoned in the Gastel Sain' Angelo upon those deadly dangerous charges ...

Fiametta could not remember anything about her mother's death. Someone else must have been taking care of her for the sick woman. She held only a scrap-vision of following the cheap and simple bier through hot, stifling, smelly streets, dressed in stiff and uncomfortable clothes and holding some big woman's hand.

It bothered Fiametta that she could recall so little of Rome. Venice, now, she could picture clearly, even how Papa had taken her there perched upon the pack-horse. The excitement of the journey, the wonder and glitter and arrogance of the city ... but there had been nothing of Mama in Venice. Fiametta had watched from her upstairs window as gaudily turbaned Moorish merchants were poled down the canal in their gondolas, or the occasional blackamoor slave of some great lord or lady, city-smooth and almost as proud as their masters, and once, the floating entourage of an Ethiopian ambassador. But none of these seemed to have any connection to Mama, the slim dark witch from Brindisi.... Fiametta was accustomed to thinking of her Papa as the powerful one, but Mama had been a sorceress too. Fiametta touched the lump of the snake belt. The silver work was Papa's, yes, but the original spell ... ? Was it Mama's? Yes ... Indeed? The dark woman smiled at Fiametta over the shoulder of the beneficent white statue.

Mama, why did you give up your power to marry Papa?

I traded it for you, love, and never regretted the bargain. Magic is power, but children are life itself, without which there is neither magic nor any good thing....

Papa regretted I was not a boy. Did you?

No, never. Fear not, Fiametta. The fullness of her power comes late to a woman. You must live your way to it, grow, and get more life ... then all that was mine shall be yours, at the still center.

No. Not all the power had been Papa's, for he had circled that center as if swung on the end of an unbreakable silver cord. Till death had broken it. Fiametta's drifting calm was swallowed by panic. But I need power now. Power, not patience. Mama. Mother Mary ...

The two faces, cool white marble, soft brown smiling flesh, fused together in a land of maternal sisterhood.You are my golden child....

Fiametta snapped awake at the wail of an infant shocked at her fleeting dream, soggy with weariness, appalled anew at the noise. The edgy din in this crowded chamber would surely drive her mad. The light of the setting sun was knifing through the window slits on the western wall. Fiametta rolled back off the pallet and visited the latrine, which stank. Even there she was not alone. She eyed the dark squares of windows cut high in the wall for ventilation, just under the eaves, and wished they were larger. The other two women left. Another screaming argument started in the adjacent dormitory. Dizzy with tension, Fiametta reached high over her head and curled her hands around a dirty ledge, and heaved herself up and half through. She hung on her belly over the stone, and stared around.

The eaves of the leaded roof overhung these tiny windows like a tent, concealing them from outside view. Beams from the ceiling thrust out to meet the roof, making triangular braces. Far below Fiametta's nose, the monastery's outer wall met the ground, weedy, rocky, deserted. With difficulty, Fiametta wriggled her hips through the little window, and laid her body across the bridging beams. Narrow, precarious, but might it make a hiding place if the monastery were overrun by Losimons? Maybe, till the beams burnt and the roof collapsed.

But at least she was alone, the mind-numbing uproar of the women's dormitory muffled to a blur of sound. She allowed herself to weep at last, though silently, lest some guard stationed on the roof above or the ground below overhear and investigate. Her tears dropped away and fell in the sunset light like molten gold in her Papa's shop falling into the basin of cold water to make the tiny round beads. The droplets puffed into the dust far below. The tears became pearls, then disappeared in the shadows as the light went. Her head and chest and belly ached with pent sobs.

Every dependency had betrayed her. Her trust had been mocked by one failure after another: Papa, Monreale, Thur … poor Thur. Drawn all unprepared into this. It was hardly his fault ... A large spider, making its web in a triangle to the west of Fiametta's head, dropped upon a strand of silk and bobbled a moment before reclimbing the thread, reminding Fiametta horribly of a man hanged. A blond young man, all blue-eyed and feckless and unlucky in love.

I could have fetched such a spider for Abbot Monreale, Fiametta decided. So what if I'd had to touch it. If only she had spoken up. Maybe it would have made the difference in the abbot's spell.

The spider sat upon its web, which was moving gently in some faint draft. The creature was fading to a black blot as the shadows deepened.

I'm only a puny girl. Somebody is supposed to save me. I'm not supposed to have to save myself. Or them.

She could do nothing, clapped up in this stone pile of a monastery. Master mage or puny girl, demonstrably one had to get closer to the target. Risking the journey. Risking ... what? Death? She risked that staying right here. Torment? Likewise. Damnation?

Not a worry that stopped Ferrante, obviously, or even slowed Vitelli down. Nor their murdering bravos.

I'd split those bastards with steel, if I were a man. If she were a man, a priest would sprinkle holy water on her bloody sword and pronounce her forgiven before the bodies had cooled. But she wasn't a man, and she doubted she'd get ten paces with a sword in her hand. Not man, but true mage. And if God wanted to damn her for using the only strength He'd given her, that was God's choice.

Her belly filled with fires of resolution, in the gathering dark. She reached out and closed her hand over the faint suggestion of a spider hanging before her nose. It wriggled and tickled the flesh of her palm. There was more to a spell than pure will. There was focus, and the accumulation of power within symbolic structure.

"Bene," she whispered to the spider, "forte." Barely able to see it, she squeezed its abdomen. Fine silver thread spun out from her hand, looping around a beam. She kicked her skirts free, and dropped upon the spider's thread toward the iron-hard ground. Her arm yanked up as the thread stretched, and held. She rotated, once, twice; her feet struck the ground with a thump, and she staggered for her lost balance.

The drop should have broken both her legs. Her impromptu spell had worked. She opened her right hand upon a gooey, crunchy, smeared blob.

Oh. I'm sorry, spider. A wave of nausea nearly overwhelmed her, and she rubbed her palm hastily upon the warm rough stone of the monastery wall to scrape off the remains.

Dizzied with the drop and the afterburn of magic along her nerves, it took her a moment to realize she was standing openly in the dusk against the wall, a clear target for any Losimon crossbowman sharp enough to have noticed the movement of her controlled fall. The spider thread, its enchantment consumed, had blown to dust upon tile wind; she could not climb up it again. Nor make that poor squashed spider spin another. She dropped flat to the ground, panting. Oh, God. Are You revenged for my pride already? Mother Mary! But no quarrel hummed viciously above her head; no shouts rained down. Only the first croakings of frogs and the last twitterings of buds floated upon the cooling darkness. She waited several minutes, rigid with fear. The darkness deepened.

Now you've done it. You can't get back in. You have to go on. She wriggled around until she freed the silver snake belt concealed under her bodice, and wound it back openly around her waist. She took a breath, swung to a crouch, bundled up her skirts, and scurried toward the woods.

The shade was blacker, under the trees, but her footsteps crackled among the leaf litter, weeds, and sticks. She stepped as carefully as she could. If she could slip through the Losimon lines and reach the road to town—

She did not scream, when the dark man in soldier's leathers leapt upon her. It wasn't as if she weren't expecting something of the sort. Still her breath caught in her throat, and her heart pounded as he spun her around. "Ha!" he cried. "Got you!"

"No. I have you," she stated, then stopped, taken aback. Even in the dimness it was clear that the man was bald as a plate, and clean-shaved. But he wore a woolen shirt under his leather vest; she could smell the dried sweat in it. "Piro," she said clearly.

His sleeves burst into flames, twining around his arms like orange flowers in the dark. Fey, she walked off into the wildly wavering torch shadows while he was still screaming and rolling on the ground. She didn't even run. His cries would bring his comrades to his aid; even now she could hear them crashing through the brush behind her. But not, she thought, after her. Few among the Losimon rank and file would be fool enough to chase an unknown sorceress through the dark fast enough to risk actually catching her. She strolled on awash in a land of disconnected lassitude, very much like the times she'd drunk too much unwatered wine. She was without fear, and wanted to sleep. Her fingers felt thick as sausages; her legs felt like wood.

This woodlot to the south of the monastery featured a ravine which ran down to the lake, where the ground flattened out and the road crossed. She slipped and scrambled down the slope, scraping her hands on the rough tree bark to slow herself. She could feel stickiness from the blood, but her hands seemed numb to pain. At the bottom a nearly dry stream oozed slimy black around pale blotches of rocks. She picked her way among them.

She froze, crouching among some fallen logs, her white sleeves crossed under her breasts, when a couple of Losimon soldiers clanked past, swords drawn. Intent on the shouts echoing faintly from the vicinity of the monastery uphill, they ran by without seeing her. They must have been guarding the road, for when she reached the dusty track, a vague ribbon in the moonless dark, it was deserted. The lake lay like black silk.

She turned south and started walking home.