2

 

Fia had seen death before, on a massive scale and without looking away, but she had not seen death like this.

Acid touched the back of her throat. But still there was something fascinating about it.

She crept closer, quiet and careful as a mouse.

The shed’s door hung half-open. It cast everything inside under sharp contrasts of light and dark. It etched a black halo around the man in the dirt. His twisted legs and slack mouth carved canyons of shadow.

The shed and the body belonged to Bandino, one of the shepherds from the other side of this rocky valley. He had served in Treviso's militia, and sometimes still stood watch for the Convent of Saint Augusta of Treviso. He knew how to handle a spear and dagger. He had never been other than unstintingly rude to Fia, but he served without being asked.

His face was blackened. His distended tongue burst through his lips. Red welts blossomed around his neck.

He had been strangled. This wasn’t just death. It was murder.

She bent, reached inside his tunic and touched bare skin. Still warm, not hot. She was enough of a familiar of death to judge the age of a body. It was a fair day out, sunny but not stifling. Cadavers took a fair amount of time to cool.

She had touched her father after his death. He’d still been feverish-hot though she’d known, from testing with a feather in front of his lips, that he’d stopped breathing more than an hour before.

Bandino’s dagger was missing from its sheath. He never traveled without it. He often sat on stones along the road to Saint Augusta's, whetting it. The earthen floor of the shed was scuffed. Someone had dragged him here.

His boots were missing. With a shiver, she saw the seams of his leggings were split. Someone had stripped him. They’d had a cool head. They'd searched all the places where a man might have hidden money.

The shed’s cob walls slumped. It wasn’t much good for anything but keeping brush during the winter, or broken tools to trade for seed. She’d come over because the open door had been a telltale mark of intrusion, a burglar with the mistaken impression that there was something valuable inside. Or a drifter looking for shelter. She’d chased more than one off Saint Augusta’s property. There’d been plenty of those the past few years. And more this summer. All because of the trouble in the east.

This was no break-in. This was a body stash. Professionally done, too. They’d searched him in quick strokes. They’d neglected to close the door, but maybe they hadn’t cared that much.

She stifled her breathing and crept back outside. The wind, an intermittent visitor on her walk back from town, had stilled. The heat made her itch. There was no sign of trouble other than what she’d left behind.

She shouldn’t have been here. Shouldn’t have come alone. She’d been away from Saint Augusta’s for three days. She, two of the mothers, and three of the other girls had gone to Treviso to buy thread and linen. She and the other girls weren’t ordinarily allowed to go, but the mothers needed someone to haul, and couldn’t spare Saint Augusta’s few animals.

Fia hadn’t had much to carry back. The mothers’ money hadn’t gone very far. The advent of the eastern mercenaries had driven up prices. So she’d raced ahead when the mothers weren’t looking. She would pay a sharp price later. None of the orphanage’s girls were ever supposed to travel alone.

Funny thing was, she still wasn’t sorry she’d gone ahead. The mothers, let alone the other girls, would be useless here. She could have counted on them to do little more than panic or pray.

She crouched, using the grass to conceal herself. She should have melted back the way she’d come. Back away from the road, into the tangled forest. Found a place to hide.

Her blood burned. Her stomach was molten iron. Her fingers trembled.

Like a lot of people around Saint Augusta’s, Bandino had been an idiot. He drank himself sick. He stared at the orphanage’s girls when they thought he wasn’t watching. He was rude for rudeness’s sake. Fia had no patience for idiots. But he hadn’t deserved this.

She was not, had never been, the kind of girl to run and hide.

She recognized she’d made the decision only in retrospect. She had to see if the girls back home were safe too. Staying low, she kept going in the direction she’d started: toward home.

She loped along the creek that S-tailed along the border of the convent’s land. Saint Augusta’s was ahead. Its cousin orphanage, Saint Niccoluccio’s monastery, stood upon the ridge farther ahead. Their shared parcel of land was small, originally purchased to support the convent alone. The convent had not been intended to serve as an orphanage. After the great pestilence, necessity had turned it into Fia’s new home, and Saint Niccoluccio’s had been hastily constructed on the far corner of the property.

Try as the keepers of each orphanage might, there’d been no way to keep the boys and girls from contact. These hills were replete with hidden places. Fia had never gone to meet one of the boys, but she knew those spots well enough to keep concealed.

By unthinking childhood habit, she trailed her hand in the wheat. Abruptly, she remembered herself. It made extra noise, extra motion. Whisper-thin and nigh invisible, but still. She had to think and act like a soldier. She had ideas what that was like.

One of the orphanage’s regular summer merchants was a Venetian named Pandolfo. He was a living repository of war stories. He looked like a soldier. He had an uncivilized tumult of a beard and a hitch in his gait he claimed he owed to a Florentine bolt. He’d indulged Fia with stories of sieges and betrayals and public executions, but always reminded her that it was a very peculiar thing for a girl to ask about. Fia had answered that she was a very peculiar girl.

Pandolfo hadn’t shown up yet this year. There was some talk that he must have gone away. Independent merchants couldn’t survive all the trouble in the east, especially the fighting and pillaging around Venice.

She crouched, sniffing for smoke. Nothing. She couldn’t believe Pandolfo was gone. He and other men of his age had survived worse. So had she.

A decade and forever ago, a great and mortiferous pestilence had gutted Italy. It had been intangible as a brush of wind, a star falling from the sky. One morning, Fia’s world started to end. Her father had died in the space of an afternoon.

She had been told, later, that he lasted two days. She remembered no night. Black buboes rose under his arm. They had gurgled, and then racked him with spasms of pain. The hair on his chest turned oily from vomit. Sweat pooled between the tendons of his neck. She’d never thought that anyone so large could be brought down so quickly except by a blade.

Her family had had warning, but the warning had not helped. They had nowhere to flee. In weeks, her neighbors’ fields had become wilderness, their homes unmarked sepulchers. The carcasses of their mules and oxen dried to bone and shoe leather under the low winter sun.

In rapid succession, as notes in an ivory-fluted melody, the rest of Fia’s family, her mother and four siblings, had been struck down. Worst of all, Fia’s twin sister had died. When she realized she was getting sick and Fia was not, she had looked at Fia accusingly.

Alone among them, Fia had survived.

The irony of the orphanages was that the pestilence preferred taking children over men and women. Children piled over the lips of Treviso’s unmarked graves. But wicked probability saw some children survive their parents, and without extended family to adopt them. Those who could be caught were carted off lest they become a burden on Treviso’s streets.

Fia would have stayed at home had she been able, but hunger had driven her to Treviso. She’d been too young to escape capture. The whip at her back had been no less sharp than for the mules.

So she’d had nowhere but Saint Augusta’s convent to make her home. And she had – sometimes by the skin of her fists.

This land was no good for farming. It was too rocky, the soil too poor. The land puckered around short, steep hills that made for exasperating plowing. Every night of the spring and summer harvests, Fia’s legs and back felt shredded. One night, she’d lain on the dormitory’s cold earth floor to numb the fire in her shoulders. She was the first to risk the mothers’ wrath by trying that, but soon the other girls joined her. Fia often led their way.

She and the other girls might not have cared for each other, but they shared their misery. Their parents’ property had been stolen away, then seized in war. No one had cared to protect their flimsy inheritances. They would have no dowries. Their only value to the husbands the church would find for them was as servants, laborers.

Fia choked to think about marriage. She wanted nothing less. She still thought of herself and the others as kids. But they hadn’t been children for a while. Fia was pretty sure she was fifteen. She’d always been bigger than the others, which made it hard to tell.

All she had heard of the outside world were stories of war that outsiders like Pandolfo had brought to them. Even that turmoil had started to seem an escape.

The boys and girls of Saint Niccoluccio’s and Saint Augusta’s were given turns tilling the land so that they wouldn’t come into contact with each other. While the boys were out, the girls would be baking bread or learning crafts. But they couldn’t always be kept from each other. During spring and late summer harvests, the nuns and the monks couldn’t watch everything.

Where they failed, Fia had stepped up. She had to keep them in line. She’d used her fists where she had to.

Mother Emilia had lamented – in that timid, tight way of nuns who wanted to curse but couldn’t – that Fia hadn’t been born a boy. Then Fia could have been exiled to Saint Niccoluccio’s, whose rowdy, violent boys could handle her.

Mother Emilia been wrong. Fia clouted plenty of boys too. She’d knocked one of the fathers down too, when he’d grabbed her arm after she’d struck a boy. So severe was the stricture against any of the fathers coming into contact with Saint Augusta’s girls that she’d never heard another word about that one.

As she’d grown older, she’d paid more attention to her peers than the nuns. And her peers had taught her a lot. They’d taught her how to hit. Then how to hit in such a way that left no marks. They’d taught her how to lead. She’d spent part of each of her shifts walking the field, being their foreman, their bully.

Even the most indolent and sullen among them knew what she wanted. Adult politics were not always so clear.

It was only midmorning, but the sun bore heat upon heat upon her. It baked the soil. Dust plastered to the sweat on her forehead. It was exactly the kind of day she’d imagined war would be fought under, a remorseless day. Weather for burning.

The soldiers menacing Venice, the condottieri, were supposed to spread fire whenever their devil winds carried them in. They burned, destroyed, ransomed, and tormented to provoke a reaction.

They were not supposed to be so close to Treviso. But their strange eastern horsemen, the stradiots, could move faster than anyone believed.

If anyone had suspected they could be here, the convent of Saint Augusta might have packed up its girls and sent them elsewhere so that they could “sleep honestly.” Fia curled her nose at that thought. As if women were guilty of anything more than being sport.

The only soldiers near were supposed to be Treviso’s allies. Mercenaries, more condottieri, passing through to purchase wheat and fodder and bolts. They weren’t supposed to be within thirty miles.

She crouched in the lee of the next hillock. Saint Niccoluccio’s was hidden behind a ridge with gravestone walls. She squinted. There was no sign of smoke. Not even chimney smoke. There should have been. If the boys were out, then the girls would be baking, or vice versa.

She edged around the hill. Her vision, stinging from sweat and dust, hazed. Something large and black, eight-legged, stirred in front of the chapterhouse. It took her too long to realize it was the convent’s two oxen, blurred together. She let her breath out.

Then she saw the third shape much farther away, by the convent’s corner. A black horse. Two more, both brown, stood almost motionless by the trees behind. One had a rider.

Her breath stuck in her throat. For a moment she was pinned to the earth, squeezed still by the weight of what she’d seen. Bandino dead. The monastery and convent’s chimneys stilled. Riders.

Neither Saint Augusta’s nor Saint Niccoluccio’s had much worth stealing. It was only the beginning of spring harvest. They had no food stockpiled. The only thing the orphanages had were their children. Even eastern barbarians wouldn’t charge into a place without scouting first. They had to have known what they would find.

They were after her and her friends. Hostages. Slaves.

She spotted more horses, but not many. In total, there were no more than half a dozen riders about the convent. She looked about, abruptly conscious of how much of the land was hidden by the fields’ slopes. She wasn’t the only one who could be hiding. The wheel-rut road to Treviso was lost behind one of the hills that made plowing so frustrating.

The wind whispered along the wheat. It was nearly, but not quite, enough to cover the noise coming from the road. A shuffling. Hooves kicking along the dirt. Then, briefly, a choke, a cry cut off.

Fia made another decision before she realized it. Carefully, staying low, she headed in that direction.

She found the girls. There were not as many as there should have been. There were about fifteen, out of Saint Augusta’s thirty-five. They marched amid four riders. The boys followed, and there were more of them – twenty or so. Fia stifled her breath. From this distance, she could not see their faces.

The kids walked in a coffle, hands unbound but a rope tight around their necks. One rider held onto the front end, and a second the rear. Together, they could draw it taut at will, choking their captives.

She hoped the missing kids had gotten away, but of course she had no means to tell. A handful of the fathers were lashed into the end of the line. There was no sign of the mothers. Fia’s throat tightened. The mothers must have gotten enough warning to flee. They had not made any attempt to defend their charges or some of them would be here right now.

None of the boys or girls walked with limps or cradled arms, though she did catch shadows that might have been bruises. Something odd – they all looked uniformly down. They had been coached to do so. The rope had been drawn tight to keep them from looking around, making noise.

The soldiers needed them silent, Fia realized, because their attack hadn’t concluded. The riders standing still by Saint Augusta’s weren’t loafing. They were keeping watch.

This handful of soldiers weren’t enough to have done all this by themselves. There still had to be others out there.

The whisper of the wind changed again. The wheat hissed. Footsteps. Breath.

Close.

She held still, a prayer frozen on her breath.

A hard shock between her shoulder blades propelled her out of her crouch. She fought for her balance, taking two stumbling steps forward, and then crashed belly first onto the dirt road.

She had landed out in full view. The riders halted. More chokes and gasps as the riders tugged the ropes.

Fia rolled, craned herself to a seat. A soldier stood where she had been, grinning and silent. His hair was unwashed, his beard wild. He had a horseman’s bowed legs. Some combination of age and sun had turned his skin prematurely old, like pumice.

The soldier’s leather armor made him look broad-shouldered, but in truth he was shorter than her. No wonder he’d been assigned to scouting. A taller soldier couldn’t have sneaked up on her.

She tried to hide her rage. After giving her a moment to appreciate her situation, he stepped toward her.

As soon as he was close enough, she lashed her leg out, kicked hard into his knee. He yelled. She hooked her leg around his ankle and pulled back.

He crashed to the ground much harder than she had.

Her head was still spinning. It took her longer than she liked to climb atop him, and that gave him time to recover. He deflected her first punch. Her second struck true, square in his nose. He didn’t so much as grunt. By then, his other arm had found leverage underneath her.

He may have been short, but he had muscles. He twisted, shoved.

She landed hard. Needle-sharp stalks of short-cut wheat pierced her cheek and neck. She rolled, too dizzy to think. She lost track of which way was up. By the time she got to her feet, her cheek and her wrist bloody, she was facing the wrong way.

The soldier could have gotten her good. But his shout of fury gave him away long before the snap of the wheat did. Like Saint Niccoluccio’s boys did when they fought, he gave too much away.

She ducked, feinted left and stepped to her right. She felt the breeze of his passage. She swung around, and slammed her elbow into the small of his back.

Too late, she saw his eight-inch blade, swinging around.

A searing hot line sliced across her ribs, down her abdomen. She spun away. The fire blazed across her chest, spread across the rest of her body. Her breath became ash, caking in her throat.

She had seen animals slaughtered before. The boys hunted, and brought their game to the girls to butcher. She knew what it would look like. She grabbed her side, expecting to be holding loose folds of skin and fat.

Nothing. Her tunic was unblemished but for the dirt.

A phantom white-hot pain ran across her side, over her belly. But there was no cut. He must have struck her, by happenstance, with the blunt side of his blade. She was lucky to live. She could hardly believe that she did.

She rose at the same time as him. They were both winded, staggering. His face was slick with blood. It oozed from his nose, down into his neck. He panted with fury.

Pain jabbed through Fia’s jaw. She’d landed harder than she’d realized. An iron-strong splinter of a dead wheat stalk stuck in her cheek.

She felt along the side of her abdomen again, just in case. Still no wound. The phantom pain was fading. But, in that moment, she had been sure she was dying.

The moment changed her.

The soldier looked along the side of his dagger as if he, too, was surprised. He had meant to kill her.

None of the riders had moved. They held their captives still. Fia’s opponent wavered. She had made enough of an impression on him that he hesitated to start another round.

She eyed the blade, tried to think of another way through this. She could have run. If she’d found enough of her breath, she could slip off the edge of their land. Find the girls who’d gotten away. Or the nuns who’d abandoned them.

If she’d wanted to run away from Saint Augusta’s, she could have, a long time ago. When she’d slipped away from her escorts this morning, she could have gone in any direction. She’d come here.

She was not the kind to run.

She raised her hands, held them palms flat. Then she turned and marched towards the riders. She didn’t dare look back at the soldier.

When the riders tied her into the coffle, they didn’t wrap her rope as tightly as around the others. They kept their distance. She glared at them. She persisted in holding her hands up until they were done.

She had been tied into the end of the line, just behind some of the fathers. The boys and girls from Saint Augusta’s and Saint Niccoluccio’s didn’t look back. They couldn’t.

It had all happened without one spoken word. Fia’s breath still burned. She couldn’t have spoken if she’d had anything to say.

After a minute of silence to make sure the noise of the scuffle hadn’t flushed out any other hidden hostages, the riders tugged the rope. Time to move.

Fia started. From somewhere, she thought she heard Pandolfo’s voice.

You’re a peculiar girl, Fiametta of Treviso.

She looked about, but her thoughts were too disordered to find its source.

A pull from behind meant that her rider had seen her looking. The other captives grunted. The rope was even tighter around their necks. She kept her gaze ahead.

A tender slice of pain traced from her ribs to her stomach. A phantom pain to go with the phantom voice. Real, but only to her. A livid, uncontrollable sensation.

If you pay attention, if you’re good…

Her cheek continued to bleed. She could not brush away the blood from her cheek while she marched, not without punishment from the rider behind her. Couldn’t look around to make sure no one was near enough to talk.

You might become worth a fraction as much as you think you are.

She did not grant the voice the dignity of answering. It did not matter. It knew that she was curious anyway.

As the coffle wound along the track and the pressure on her neck eased, Fia finally smelled smoke. She turned her head just long enough to catch the fire teasing the horizon. The rider behind her yanked the rope. The last she saw of Saint Augusta’s was the roof, aflame.