"You"d be right. I am angry with him. But when has that ever made obeying his orders something I could choose to do? I"ll do what"s necessary when the time comes." She flicked a water droplet off the end of her nose. "He"ll learn."
"The bridge, Mistress. What was wrong with the bridge?"
"Was it not obvious, Signore Buber?" said Allegretti.
"No. No it wasn"t. Though it was to that b.a.s.t.a.r.d cat. What could it see that I couldn"t?" Even now, the marks on his cheeks had set uncertainly, and the earlier wound from the arrow was looking puckered and white between the black st.i.tches.
"That the bridge ..." started the witch.
"...was not there," finished Allegretti. He smiled to himself, and at the woman"s consternation. "Oh, come. It is hardly a secret."
"No, that"s exactly what it is," she said. "The prince said that no one must know."
"Hang on," said Buber. "Not there? I walked on it. So did you, Master Allegretti."
"I cannot deny it. But you asked what the cat could see the answer is it saw precisely nothing. As did my horse, your horse, their horses."
"But ..." said Buber, then quite deliberately he shut his mouth and looked away. They rode on for a while, and eventually the silence between them became unbearable.
"Something else you wish to say, signore?" prompted Allegretti.
All Buber could think about were the unicorns, how their horns were just sat in the hollows made by their missing bodies. He"d always a.s.sumed he"d always been told that the horns were the most magical part of them. What if that wasn"t true? What if it were the exact opposite, and the horn was the only part of the beast that wasn"t magical?
Nothing had stolen them away. They had, like the bridge, just ceased to be.
He stared at the woman, all in white. "Does the prince know?"
"He knows everything he needs to know to make the decisions he alone can make." She gave him another smile; thin-lipped, more desperation than mirth.
"But you can still..."
"Yes," she said, "and before you ask, I don"t know why."
"But the..."
She sighed, the sound catching in the back of her throat, making it end in a growl. "Yes. I know."
"Apparently, signore, she knows. So do you. So do I, at least in part. As does the prince. Who else?"
Buber immediately thought of Thaler: had he worked it out? There were so many books in that library of his: what was the likelihood of finding the right one?
"I don"t know. No one. I think," he answered.
"Not so," said Allegretti. "A great many people know. Except they chose not to be here."
"The hexmasters?" Buber blinked. "How long has this been going on for?"
"Weeks, months even." The woman in white looked entirely resigned. "If magic started to fail, they would have been the very first to realise. They"d know the signs long before anybody else would even suspect anything was wrong."
Buber remembered the gold florins he"d been given for the first unicorn, and how very solicitous, very insistent, the masters had been. "I should have known, too."
"You?" There was scorn in her voice.
"Yes," he said, irritated. "Me. I don"t suppose you know anything about any missing children, do you?"
It was her turn to get annoyed. "No."
"Nothing at all? Four kids, that I know about? About one a month? All under twelve."
"No."
"It"s just that if you know how long this has been going on for, maybe you know about them?"
"The masters tell us nothing."
Allegretti narrowed his eyes and shook his head slightly, but Buber missed the expression and ploughed on regardless.
"What do you mean? You"re one of them." Now he noticed. "Aren"t you?"
"Signore Buber, may I introduce Signorina Agana, adept of the Order of the White Robe."
"An adept? You have got to be f.u.c.king joking."
There was a pause, and Allegretti eventually said: "Not the most tactful response. She can still immolate you where you sit."
She was staring at him. She hadn"t raised her hands, or made any threatening gesture towards him. But her look was such that he suddenly realised that he needed to apologise, completely and at once.
"I"m sorry. I didn"t mean that you couldn"t, or weren"t a ..." He closed his eyes and wondered how death would take him. Magic terrified him, like it did most people.
"If I had a short temper, huntmaster, I would have died long ago."
He opened first one eye, then the other. Her gaze was steady, despite the cold wind and the rain blowing at her face. Then she laughed.
"It"s what they do," she continued. "They goad you. Belittle you at every opportunity. Strip you and beat you, and you"re too weak to resist. They call it training, but they actually enjoy every last humiliation they heap on you. If they manage to break you, they count it a success. If they don"t, the next time you make a mistake, they are twice as vicious. I have survived all that. Your mis-spoke words? Hardly worth mentioning."
"I"m still sorry, Mistress." And he genuinely was. He"d had no idea.
"I think the man"s suffered enough, signorina."
She turned her head with a flick. "He has no idea what suffering is."
"Signore Buber is well-enough acquainted with hardship, I think," said Allegretti mildly. "This is, however, a mere distraction, which we must turn away from and come to one mind over a different matter: what is to be done?"
"Us?" The adept seemed surprised that the conversation was to include her. "We follow, and the prince leads."
"A n.o.ble att.i.tude, signorina. But our service would surely be rendered all the more valuable for being considered, timely, and, how shall we say..."
"Not stupid?" ventured Buber.
"I would have gone for wise. Your version lacks grace." Allegretti removed his hat, squeezed the excess water from it over to his side, then spent a while reshaping it. "Let me put it this way: we are twenty or so horse, travelling towards an enemy of considerably greater number. Our armour is back on the wagons, which may or may not reach us in time, and our spearmen of considerable a.s.sistance when facing cavalry are exhausting themselves elsewhere. We have our melee weapons, but little else. They have plentiful bows, as Signore Buber has discovered. Our esteemed sorcerer is with us, which is excellent, but whereas before we had infantry to protect her, now we do not. How can we three stop this turning into the disaster it threatens to become?"
His hat went back on his head, looking much sorrier than before.
"Why us?" asked Buber.
"Because we owe our lord as much? If he is Carinthia, and it is Carinthia we are sworn to protect, then it is us who are best placed to accomplish such a task."
"We are?"
Allegretti shrugged. "Who else? Signorina, can you protect the prince?"
"I don"t know. I can try, but he"ll be at the very front, won"t he?" She frowned. "But I"ll be busy. I don"t see anyone else around here who can cast spells."
"There is always the Teuton shaman."
"I"m certain he won"t be able to cast, and the prince has his earls to protect him, anyway."
"I have yet to see," said the Italian, "twenty hors.e.m.e.n win against three hundred. Especially when those twenty are on heavy horse but are essentially unarmoured. Signore Buber, do you know where the Teutons are?"
Buber scratched at his head. "I left Torsten Nadel to keep track of them. When we see him, they won"t be far away." He chewed at his lip. "No, then. I don"t know where the Teutons are. We could get no warning at all."
"All the more reason to make a plan now. Signorina, you cannot protect the prince. Neither can I."
"No?" she said.
"No. Felix is my first concern. Those are my orders from the prince himself. I will not save the man at the expense of the boy." Allegretti seemed content with his role, and looked across to Buber. "That leaves you, huntmaster."
"I can ride well enough," he said, "but I"m not a trained cavalryman. Are you honestly expecting me to charge the Teuton horse with the others?"
"No. Which leads us to one conclusion, does it not?" Allegretti waited for the others to mentally catch up.
"It means ..." Buber screwed up his face with the effort.
"G.o.ds, man," said the adept. "He means to let the prince die if he"s so determined to carry on with this madness."
"We can"t do that!"
"We can"t prevent it, Buber. All we can do is plan for the inevitable disaster."
"But ..." He was spluttering. He had no answer.
"The signorina is quite correct," said Allegretti. "If it comes to it, and we pray to the G.o.ds that it does not, if we are faced with defeat, what would you rather do? See Carinthia annihilated, or salvage something from the flames? Shall we fight to the last man or woman or shall we save the heir to the throne? The prince has not thought of this. We, his loyal subjects, must be ready."
Buber"s throat was dry, despite the rain. He sucked at his sleeve to wet his mouth. "So what do you want me to do?"
"Your task is simple. The new prince will need a hexmaster. Since we only have one, you must protect her with your life. I will be Felix"s shield. You will be hers."
"This is crazy. This is almost treason." Buber shook his head.
"It would be treasonous not to do this, signore. We serve the Prince of Carinthia to the very end."
"And from the very beginning," said the witch.
"We cannot tell anyone what we have agreed here. But we must be ready." Allegretti wiped the rain from his face, then dug under his clothes for a small silver flask. "Shall we drink to seal our fortunes?"
He unstoppered the container and swigged from its contents, before pa.s.sing it across to the adept. She sniffed cautiously and took the smallest taste before leaning sideways to hand it to Buber.
"I don"t drink spirits," she said. "It ruins my concentration."
Buber was more than happy to make up the difference. He tipped the flask skyward and drank deeply. The schnapps burnt on the way down, and put a fire in his belly, at least for the moment.
He didn"t want this. He didn"t want any part of it. Allegretti"s plans felt wrong, yet were right enough to be convincing. What if they ran straight into the pack of howling Teutons? How long would they last? Long enough to grab the boy and run?
Someone needed to have the presence of mind to act in that moment. He gave the flask back to the witch, who pa.s.sed it on without imbibing further. Allegretti had another nip before closing it up and hiding it away.
"I should be scouting ahead, not skulking behind," said Buber. "Obernberg is only a mile or two away."
"And yet the prince demands you stay at the rear." Allegretti bent his head, and a drop of water collected at the end of his nose. He curled his lip and blew it away. "He is a hard man to help."
"Well, I"m going to try. We"re sleepwalking into this, and no one else seems to care." Buber nudged his sodden horse forward, and slowly made his way back up the line.
18.
Buber was given grudging permission to ride ahead. His horse, cold and stiff, was equally reluctant to do anything but plod: it would trot for a short while, then subside into a heavy-footed walk. Buber was getting frustrated with the beast.
He tried to remember what Obernberg was like: a market square, maybe even as big as the one at Simbach, but the houses around it were pretty much all there was. The town was on top of the hill overlooking the river. There was a sacred grove, too, which he thought he"d have to pa.s.s on the way to the square. Then there was a big stone building, constructed from the remains of the old Roman fort. That was on the highest point, and it had commanding views of the bridge. In fact, there"d be very little about the place that a Roman wouldn"t still have recognised if he"d stepped from his grave and looked around.
Farm tracks led left and right to squat collections of roofs. The light was p.i.s.s-poor, and the rain was sheeting, coming across his vision in bands stretched from cloud to ground. The tops of the trees swayed hard.
Then he stopped. There were people ahead, sheltering next to a wall by the side of the road, and enough of them that they spilt out onto the road itself.
They had horses, he could see that much. He blinked away the rain and pressed his hand to his forehead to divert the water away from his eyes.
No, they all had horses. And they were all men, now moving from a close-packed knot where they"d huddled for warmth into a loose ma.s.s of arms and legs. It was as if he"d kicked an ants" nest.
The first man swung up on horseback and started towards him. Quickly.
"s.h.i.t. s.h.i.t s.h.i.t s.h.i.t."
Buber was facing the wrong way for a quick escape. In the time it would take him to turn, the Teuton would be on him, and moments later all his friends would be there, too.