The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [68]
He glanced up at the moonless sky and raised the carafe.
“Z’Acatto!” he said. “You should have come! We could have argued about this wine. To you, old man!”
Z’Acatto had claimed there was no vintage north of Tero Gallé worth drinking, but this one proved him wrong. Whether he was too stubborn to admit that was, of course, the issue. Cazio wondered how his mentor was doing. Surely he was still abed in Dunmrogh, considering his injuries.
He gazed around the garden he’d found. The meal had been excellent and exotic. The northern lands might be a bit barbaric, but the food was definitely interesting, and at the duchess’s there was plenty of it. But after a few glasses of wine, the gabble around him had lost all intelligibility.
The duchess was able to carry on a passable conversation in Vitellian, but though she had flirted with him a bit on the ride, she quite naturally was concentrating on catching up with Anne. He was too tired to try to muddle clumsily through in the king’s tongue, so after the meal he’d gone looking for a bit of solitude, and he had found it here.
Glenchest—such odd names they had in this part of the world—seemed to be more garden than anything else, rather like the grounds of the Mediccio in z’Irbina where he and z’Acatto had once pilfered a bottle of the fabled Echi’dacrumi de Sahto Rosa.
Of course, there hadn’t been frozen rain all over the place in z’Irbina, nor did Vitellian gardens favor evergreen hedges trimmed to resemble stone walls as this one did, but the results were still pleasing. There was even a statue of Lady Fiussa, whose image had also graced the square in his hometown of Avella. It made him feel a bit at home.
He doffed his hat to the nude slip of a saint who stood in the paved center of a small, clover-shaped courtyard and rested on a marble bench to finish his wine. His hands ached with the cold, but the rest of him was surprisingly warm, courtesy not only of the wine but also of the excellent doublet and hose the duchess had given him. The orange leggings were thick and woolen, and the black upper garment was of supple leather lined with fur. Over all that was thrown a wide-sleeved quilted coat, and his feet were snugged in buskins.
He sat in the warm pool of light cast by his lamp and was lifting the carafe again in toast to the duchess’s excellent taste in clothing, when a feminine voice interrupted his reverie.
“Cazio?”
He turned and found Austra regarding him.
Elyoner had given her presents, as well: an indigo gown over which she wore a robe of deep brown fur of some sort Cazio did not recognize, though he thought the hood was trimmed with white mink. Her face seemed ruddy, even for lamplight, probably from the cold.
“Hello, lovely,” he said. “Welcome to my little kingdom.”
Austra didn’t answer for a moment. Cazio wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light that she seemed to be rocking back and forth on her heels, as if trying to keep balance on something narrow. He kept expecting her to put her arms out to steady herself.
“Do you really think I’m lovely?” she blurted, and Cazio realized that she’d had at least as much wine as he had.
That was something the duchess was good at, apparently: getting people to drink her wine.
“As the light of sunrise, as the petals of the violet,” he answered.
“No,” she said a bit angrily. “None of that. You say that sort of thing to every woman you meet. I want to know what you think of me, just me.”
“I—” he began, but she rushed on.
“I thought I was going to die,” she said. “I’ve never felt so completely alone. And I prayed you would find me, but I feared you were already dead. I saw you fall, Cazio.”
“And I did find you,” Cazio said.
“Yes, you did,” she said. “You did, and it was wonderful. Like that first time you saved me—saved us, back near the coven. You put yourself between us and harm without even asking why. I fell in love with you then. Did you know that?