Shadowheart (32 page)

Matteo scrambled up the stairs like a silent cat. Elayne threw herself after him, managing to grab him by one ankle. He kicked and squirmed, but Elayne held on with the strength of desperation. She rose just enough to fall upon him with her full length, pinning him to the stairs as they struggled in silence while Nim danced around.

The weak light winked out. With Matteo panting and wriggling beneath her and Nim snuffling at her shoulder, Elayne realized with horror that the door had closed behind them, with the lantern on the other side.

“Be still!” she hissed in Matteo’s ear. “Matteo, Matteo, listen to me for the love of God. You must not go!” She wanted to scream at him, but she kept her words next to his ear. She wanted to plead with him to understand the hideousness of what he thought to do, but she had no time or reason to reach a child’s heart that had been twisted so badly. Instead she whispered, “Do you want your father’s men to catch Il Corvo? Do you care nothing for Zafer and Margaret? He is in there now to save them, and it will take every atom of his skill to do it. Every instant is a danger to him. To all of them. Do you understand? You cannot
help, but only hinder. You cannot earn his trust this way,
but you might be the cause of his downfall. He does not expect you, or know what you intend—Matteo, I pray you, I pray you, do not put him in such danger.”

Her voice caught, for the unexpected strength of what she felt. Matteo ceased his fight, suddenly going limp beneath her. He lowered his head, his small shoulders shaking. “I want to help!” he whispered. “I only want to help.”

Elayne sat up carefully, making certain she did not lose her hold on him. There was a tiny amount of light from somewhere above; she could barely see the pale shape of his face as she pulled him close into her arms. For a moment he resisted her and then pressed his face to her shoulder.

“I knew I couldn’t do it,” he said brokenly. “I c-can’t do anything right. He’ll never trust me now.”

He does not deserve it, she thought fiercely. Allegreto never deserved such love, not for what he had made of this boy. But she did not speak past the ache of anger and fear and love in her own throat.

As she held him, there came a sound, a huge low boom that seemed to reverberate through the very stone around them. Nim gave a nervous half-bark. The evening hymns ceased. Elayne turned to look up the stairs, clutching Matteo as the boy twisted to see. Above them was nothing but shadow. From a great distance shouts of alarm filtered down.

“We must go back,” she said urgently. She pulled him with her toward the door. He did not resist—the depth and strength of that sound was warning enough that something beyond their grasp had happened above.

Elayne blindly explored the door, searching for a latch or carvings. But the metal was a blank wall under her hands. She could find neither handle nor symbols, and no way to force it open, not under all her strength.

From a spy hole under the parapet walk, Allegreto watched the drawbridge and the outer gatehouse burn, pouring black smoke against the last glow of twilight on the snowy mountains. One jostle of the two glass vials that he had carried through the tunnels to the bridge, and he would have seen Hell himself far sooner than he wished. But he was not yet blown to pieces, and the arrows shot by Philip’s best marksmen had ignited the powder of fulminating gold in a crack of thunder that echoed off the walls and soared instantly into flame along timbers anointed with resin and sulfur. The only known way out of Maladire was a sheet of unquenchable fire.

There were others, but he was already certain that the Riata had not discovered them. What secret ways they had found had been blocked or destroyed. Allegreto had spent the past day and night surveying passages and traps that he well-remembered—his fathers exacting tests had burned the mysteries of Navona into his mind and his bones. He knew where Zafer and Margaret were chained; he knew where Franco Pietro slept with five guards around him and a mastiff at his feet.

He knew that Franco would comprehend at any moment that he had fallen into a trap. Allegreto left the spy hole and slipped lightly down a set of stairs between the outer walls, counting his steps in blackness. At the first sliver of light above, he hiked himself up by handholds and found the opening at the peak of a storehouse roof. He squeezed himself through—not as easily as he had done in younger days—and felt his way down the slant of a beam to the heavy wooden column that held up the roof.

He was losing all light as he made his way across the trusses, landing off-balance and catching himself twice. But he had a cold exhilaration in him now, to move silently above the confusion he had caused below. He found the opening into the false ceiling as if the hidden ways of Maladire were drawn on some map within his blood. Crouching down on his ankles, he crawled between the double rafters until he could smell smoke again and see faint light between the planks.

He was near the courtyard—outside the shouts were louder and the fire rumbled. An orange-tinted glow illuminated the barred window in the door of the storeroom below. He could just see Zafer sitting on a bare floor, looking up, one fist gripped around the chain that held him to the wall, the other holding Margaret’s arm.

Allegreto pushed a straw between the boards and let it fall. Zafer gave the clear signal and leaped to his feet, urging Margaret up silently. Allegreto laid back a sham ceiling plank and dropped through the hole.

It was the sound of evening service that befooled Elayne. When they could not return through the bronze door, she had guessed that they must be under the church that overlooked the piazza. The smell of bitter smoke began to fill the stairwell, ominous enough to drive her up toward the faint light and some hope of another way. The stairs ascended a great distance, but only led in the end to an arched cavern—a dark cistern full of water, strangely lit by reflections from the small drain above. The single ledge was so narrow that she had to pull Nim back from falling into the black water.

Matteo stood behind her, holding her skirt and peering past. “Don’t let Nim go!” he said.

“No.” She wet her lips. There must be some opening to this cistern—they could not be trapped here. It was impossible to judge the depth of the water, but she feared from the size of the pool that it must be deep. She could not see the far side well enough to discern if there were another ledge or door. The smell of smoke and the shouts were much stronger here, sounding almost as if they were overhead. She swallowed a rising sense of terror.

This must be the cistern for the fortress. She much feared that they were under Maladire itself, and the castle was burning.

“Your Grace,” Matteo said. “Look at this.”

She could barely see as he tugged her skirt, turning her back toward the stairs. But there were no stairs now. There was only wall, until he moved his arm quickly up and down. She nearly leaped backward into the water as she saw a pale shape in the wall move with it.

“Mirrors,” he said. “Like the castle at Il Corvo.”

Elayne stared at the wall. If he did not move his arm, she could make nothing of it but more stone in the dim shadows, but when he waved his hand in a certain direction, she could see the pale flash appear and vanish and appear again. She put out her fingers and found nothing where she expected wall to be. But when she took a step forward, and stretched, she found it an arm’s length beyond, where she touched the silver reflection of her hand and her skirts in a series of small glassy plates set at angles in the stone.

“This way!” Matteo said confidently, and led her into a passage where it seemed no passage should be.

They could not discover a way that led back out of the castle. The narrow steps Matteo had found went into darkness again, the walls closing upon Elayne’s shoulders as they climbed blindly. She began to feel smothered, as if the whole weight of the towers and fortress above pressed upon her throat and lungs; as if she would be trapped in this black maze until she screamed to get out. She gripped Nim’s leash in one hand and Matteo’s shirttail in the other, not to hold him back now but to know she wouldn’t be left alone in this crushing darkness.

The boy stopped suddenly. “This is the end of it,” he whispered.

“The end?” Elayne felt a spurt of dismay as she looked up, seeing nothing. The shouts had faded, more distant now.

“I think—” Matteo moved up a step. “I can see a little. There’s a peephole. I think it is a church.”

“Let me look!”

They stumbled over one another, trying to exchange places in the tiny stairwell, while Nim entangled herself between Elayne’s feet. She found the crack and looked through into a tiny candlelit chapel.

They seemed to be close to the altar, opposite a pair of choir stalls. In the steady glow of the candelabras, Elayne could see painted frescoes covering the walls and the golden gleam of a large crucifix. She glimpsed no priest or congregation—the service abandoned while everyone ran to the fire.

She felt over the wooden barrier. Her fingers touched metal, and without a sound, the panel before her sprang open. The sensation of being freed was so strong that she barely glanced around before she gathered her skirts and crawled through.

She emerged onto the seat of another choir stall. The empty chancel and nave were small but richly decorated, tiled in black-and-white marble and painted over every inch of the walls with the saints and gilded halos of some biblical cycle that Elayne did not pause to identify. She only made certain that there was no one in the nave and then took a madly struggling Nim as Matteo lifted her through the open back of the stall.

Elayne wished now that she had her mantle and veil; in the confusion of the fire, there might be some chance they could reach the widow’s house without notice. The smell of smoke was dense and peculiar here, a sharp foul scent overlaid on the sweet incense of the candles. With Matteo and Nim close at her heels, she hurried down the vaulted nave and pulled open the door a crack.

In the last of twilight the tower of Maladire loomed directly over them, a turreted silhouette against black smoke that billowed across a rose and steel-blue sky.

Elayne stepped back and let the door fall shut.

They were inside the fortress.

Matteo stood looking at her expectantly. She had seen no one outside, only the tower and a snow-covered court that looked as wild as the mountainside, full of steep outcrops of gray rock, with the castle walls and buildings rooted into them as if the stone had grown up naturally into shapes of man’s desire.

She was certain that Allegreto had caused the fire—he had made sure the garrison was lightly manned, and now diverted by the blaze. He was here somewhere, hunting Franco Pietro. If he succeeded—when he succeeded—he might see the open window seat in the widow’s house and search the secret tunnels and find them.

She thought of the dark, and the walls pressing upon her. She could not do it. Nothing would make her go back into the narrow passages between the walls, trapped into the lightless tunnels by dead ends and mirrors.

“There must be a crowd of townspeople at the gate,” she whispered. “We’ll try to look as if we’ve come to gawk.”

Matteo nodded, wide-eyed now and willing enough to take her direction. She grabbed his hand and pulled the door open quickly before she could be paralyzed by second thoughts and guesses.

They slipped and slid down uneven steps carved in the rock. The column of smoke and commotion of voices made it easy enough to head toward the fire; once they found the crowd, they would see where the townsfolk came into the castle and escape that way. Elayne went down the steep court, following a path of footprints in the snow, keeping her eyes on the ground to avoid twisting an ankle on the icy surface.

Nim had no such concerns. She ranged at the end of the leash, threatening to pull Elayne off her balance at every step. Elayne managed to keep her feet halfway down the courtyard, until the puppy lunged forward with a happy bark. Elayne slipped and skidded and shrieked as her feet flew from under her. She hit the cold ground hard, an impact that sent pain from her back to her teeth. As she sat stunned, Matteo slid past her, chasing the loose dog. A pair of men strode around the corner below, their torch flaring light over the court.

Elayne scrambled to her feet, trying to back up and turn away. Her heels slid without purchase; she was only saved from another fall as one man took her arm roughly, his mailed hand digging into her skin to hold her up. She kept her eyes down, watching Nim roll in submissive ecstasy under the nose of a great brown mastiff, her plumed tail flinging snow. The other man had caught Matteo.

“Lying bitch!” he roared, and reached to grab Elayne’s jaw while he held the boy tight. “I’ll—” He jerked her chin up, and then as suddenly let go.

She did not look up, but she had already seen the dark patch over his left eye. Her heart was pounding frantically.

“Nay, it is not the infidel’s whore,” Franco Pietro snarled. “God send they’re still locked up, then.” He made a gesture, as if to order his man up the court, and then paused. Under the glare of the torch, his face was distorted and puckered along a scar from his lips to the eye-patch, the shadows making it an evil mock of Matteo’s delicate features. But they were frighteningly alike, the boy wrenching and struggling and the father who gripped him easily in an unknowing grasp.

“Hold her,” Franco said to the guard. He caught Elayne’s chin again with a brutal hand. “You aren’t from the castle. Who are you?”

She kept her eyes down, afraid that even in the dark their color might betray her. She answered nothing.

“My lord,” the guard said, his hand so tight on her arm that her fingers tingled with pain. He lifted the torch. “My lord—look at this boy …”

“He’s my brother!” Elayne said quickly. “He ran away from me at the fire, chasing the pup.”

But Franco paid her no attention now. He was frowning at Matteo.

“He was only following the dog, my lord!” Elayne said, her voice high-pitched with strain. “Let me take him home, and he’ll suffer our father’s wrath!”