The Buccaneer's Apprentice Page 8

  “What are you up to, spy?” she asked, suspicious.

  “Spy?” Nic asked. Where in the world had she gotten that idea? If only he could get to his sword.

  Perhaps some flicker of his glance or inclination of his body gave away his intentions, because the girl risked a look over her shoulder. She spied the sword buried in the sand, and a smile of triumph crossed her lips. Nic’s heart sunk. She was going to get it for herself. “That’s mine,” he warned her. His mind began working quickly. “It’s cursed, like me. Woe to you if you touch it.”

  She seemed to eye the carved bone handle and its trophy of human scalp. “Liar,” she finally announced.

  “Find out if I am,” he warned. Every muscle in his body tensed as he readied himself to make his move. “Have you heard of Prince Berto and the accursed withering of his arm?”

  “Prince Berto was cursed by the Scepter of Thorn and the Olive Crown,” she said. She eyed the weapon once more. “Not by a killer’s sword.”

  “The curse is the same,” Nic said, sounding more confident at her hesitation. “Care to discover for yourself?”

  Apparently the girl did not. She stepped away from the cave. Nic saw her fist draw back. It was time to make his move. He forgot about his throbbing head. With a cry of triumph, Nic let loose the handful of sand he’d been saving for exactly this moment, letting it fly in the girl’s face. She would be blinded by the dirt and rock, allowing him to grab his sword and gain the upper hand. Jacopo would help him bind her as she had him, and he could use her as a hostage to barter his freedom with her comrades.

  At least, that was the theory. For at the very same moment that Nic loosed his handful of sand, the girl sent a similar hidden volley in his direction. His eyes watered and stung, abraded by the sharp grains that flew into his face. For a moment, the air hung heavy with dust, and both Nic and the girl coughed and spat and fell to their knees, trying to clear their eyes.

  It was into this pitiful display that Jacopo Colombo stepped. He came to a stop between them. “Niccolo Dattore,” he asked, in the mildest of tones. “Would it be too much of an inconvenience were I to ask that you not kill my daughter?”

  The natives of the Azure Isles are a savage race, with teeth like vipers and a ruthless thirst for blood that would give pause even to the mighty armies of the Yemeni. Or so it is rumored, for no sophisticated soul has seen them and lived to tell the tale.

  —Celestine du Barbaray, Traditions & Vagaries of the

  Azure Coast: A Guide for the Hardy Traveler

  It had not taken Nic very long to figure out something after he began his service to the Arturos. No matter how many broadsides printed with rapturous reviews they pinned to the boards outside their theaters, and regardless of the way they referred to the Theatre of Marvels as the finest performing artists in the countryside, they were not one of Cassaforte’s major dramatic troupes. The dockside stages on which they appeared were rowdy wrestling rings compared to the opulence of the city’s finest theaters—particularly those near the mouth of the Via Dioro, in the palace square. The Arturos’ homegrown scripts, well-received though they might have been, were not penned by the foremost dramatists of the lands. Ingenue, though pretty, was not as lovely as the famous actress Tania Rossi, who was not only featured in many a Buonochio painting and honored by no less an august personage as King Alessandro himself, but was courted by many elder sons among the Thirty.

  No, the Arturos were definitely a second-rate theatrical troupe. During most seasons they provided a cheap evening’s entertainment to workers and everyday merchants. In the summers, when the city’s theaters were too warm and close to encourage attendance, the Arturos took to the road to entertain the smaller towns deep in the pasecollina, the stretch of farmlands and vineyards that ran for a hundred leagues to the mountainous foothills that marked the Vereinigtelände border. They had played in the famous open amphitheater of Nascenza, true. More likely they were to be found in a converted barn in the cow town of Turran, or playing to the entertainment-hungry craftsman in one of the several insula outposts.

  Nic had been with the Arturos for perhaps two months when they had visited Fero, a small crafting colony of the Insula of the Children of Muro. The drama they had performed that night was typical fare—Hero was being called upon to save Ingenue from being forced into marriage with the conniving Knave, with Pulcinella acting as Ingenue’s maid and Infant Prodigy providing songs between scenes—and Nic had been standing off in the darkness, ready to help Ingenue with her costume change. He had seen this particular drama perhaps a dozen times by that point and knew many of the lines as well as the actors, but as always, he was caught up in the melodrama. A big grin on his face, he watched as Ingenue gasped and tossed her hair while the Signora, playing her disapproving older sister, begged her not to leave home.

  So caught up in the action was he that he nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the voice of his master in his ear. “The purest of ham acting, isn’t it? You know, I intended that part to be Ingenue’s mother, not sister. The Signora claims she’s not old enough for that sort of role, of course.” Armand’s hand restrained Nic from leaping to attention. “No, enjoy it, lad. It’s all part of the magic. The magic of theater.” Seeing Nic’s expression, his master smiled as well. “You like it here with us, do you?”

  “Oh, yes sir,” Nic had replied with all the fervor he knew. “More than I can say.”

  “Good lad. Good lad,” said Armand Arturo. He crossed his arms. “Have you ever thought about it?” At Nic’s quizzical expression, he added, “The stage, my boy. Taking a turn on it.”

  “You mean acting?” Nic nearly laughed. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “You couldn’t? No, of course you couldn’t, no, of course.” The man had scratched his chin and studied Nic for a moment. “So you’ve never, say, been polite to one of your former masters on a day he’s treated you badly? Or smiled and pretended you weren’t in pain when every bone and bump ached?”

  Nic’s hand automatically flew to the place on his forehead. The knot the Drake had left there had vanished by then, but a half-moon scar the shape of his cane handle would remain there for years to come. “That’s not the same.”

  “It’s acting, Niccolo.” Signor Arturo had leaned in close, because Ingenue and Knave were then speaking in quieter voices. “It’s remembering what normal and happy are like when you feel anything but, and saying lines you must instead of the words you want. We do it in the flames of footlights. You’ve done it by the light of day, every day of your life. Some have a better knack of it than others. Trust me, Nic, lad, you could do it. I have an eye for talent.” He laid a finger aside his nose and winked. “I have the eye.”

  Though he understood what Armand meant, Nic was still dubious. “I still think it’s different,” he said. It was still a novelty to be able to disagree with one of his masters. “On the stage, you have to know where to enter and exit. There’s props. There’s business.”

  “My poor lady,” said his master, pointing at the stage. Ingenue and the Signora were carrying out a complicated bit of business in which the Signora was supposed to be concealing a love letter to Ingenue from Hero, so that Ingenue would assume that Hero was no longer faithful and true. Only tonight, the Signora had forgotten the letter. Her hands dug into her bosom where it should have been, and kept coming up empty. She continued to say her lines as she dug more deeply. When it became obvious that she would have to do without the folded paper, she continued on as smoothly as if she’d had it. Did the craftsman and apprentices in the audience notice? If so, they didn’t show a trace of distraction, as absorbed as they were in the summer night’s proceedings.

  “She’s improvising, though,” Nic said. It had been a neat piece of business.

  “And getting away with it. She’s a professional, that woman. Better than Knave.” Signor Arturo whistled. “You should see how ve
ry bad he is without a script. Oh, the stories I could tell, lad. Why do you think she’s getting away with it, though?”

  Nic thought for a moment. “Because she didn’t falter,” he had said at last.

  “She looks like she knows what she’s doing. She appears to be in authority,” said Armand.

  “People believe that?” Nic wanted to know.

  Signor Arturo laid his finger alongside his nose once more, and then pointed at Nic. “That’s all acting is. You take a deep breath. You stand straight. You become the person that you want them to believe in. And then you go on.”

  It was a night that Nic had reason to recall, stranded in the Dead Strait. The fire warming them was much smaller than the one that had been blazing before the makeshift stage in Fero. But it was just as dark beyond the edges of its flickering light, and the stars were in nearly the same position as the summer before. While he wasn’t exactly treading the boards among the footlights, he was having to act—specifically, act like the man that Jacopo Colombo treated him as, instead of a lost servant adrift in the most remote reaches of the Azure Sea. “What I’m about to share with you, Niccolo, is confidential,” the old man was saying. By the crackling fire, the man sat with a posture that would not have seemed amiss at the dinners of the Thirty. Still, for all his dignity, he still appeared to be immensely frail. “Have you heard my name before?”

  Jacopo’s daughter watched Nic’s every reaction. Her eyes reflected the flames of the small fire—or else they blazed on their own while she studied his every slightest movement. Self-conscious of her appraisal, yet still attentive, Nic shook his head. “No, signor.”

  “The name I gave you is my own, but it is not my title.” Jacopo’s daughter shot him a warning look. He quelled her with an upraised hand. “Among some circles, I am addressed as Nuncio. No,” he added quickly, after noticing Nic’s reaction of surprise. “This is not the place for bowing or whatever you’ve been taught to do.”

  “If,” said the girl suddenly, her Azurite accent strong, “he has been taught to do anything.”

  “Darcy.” Jacopo’s brow furrowed. Nic was offended, but not very deeply. People of privilege thought the worst of him constantly.

  “Papa, we don’t know a thing about him.”

  “I listened to them talking in the cave, my dear.”

  “You fell asleep,” she pointed out. Nic noticed for the first time how heavy her eyebrows were, as they crumpled in on themselves. They were almost a man’s brows, though on the girl they somehow seemed appropriate. “You weren’t supposed to fall asleep.”

  “Nonetheless,” replied Jacopo, sounding slightly abashed, “I heard enough to know that the boy is a victim, not a villain.”

  “A victim of the same pirates who have brought you to these dire circumstances!” Whether Nic was appealing to the father or daughter, he was uncertain, but he managed to modulate his voice so that he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about.

  “No.” Jacopo ignored a warning glance from his daughter, who announced her frustration by taking what looked like a long pair of tongs the length of her arm and jabbing with them at the fire’s hot coals. “Though Darcy and I have been stranded on this isle for nearly a week, it was not brigands who forced us to become castaways.”

  “Then who, signor?” Nic felt ill-equipped to deal with the confidentialities of a nuncio. Kings and courtiers were more Jacopo Colombo’s usual set … not a dogsbody like himself.

  Jacopo sighed. “I was not always Nuncio to Pays d’Azur. My father had been a hero of the Azurite Invasion, and after Pays d’Azur withdrew its forces from the siege, he used his honor fee to establish a mercantile concern.” Nic nodded with the respect the information was due. Heroes of the invasion were those who had lost a limb or more during Cassaforte’s most bloody battle. “It was a business I handled myself from the time I was a young man. I have lived most of my life in Pays d’Azur, in the capital of Côte Nazze. I married there. My daughter was raised there. I buried her mother there, long ago.” Darcy turned her head then until her face was concealed by her thick mane of hair. “It was my home, and I counted the people as my friends. When King Alessandro re-ascended the throne after the coup, not long ago, he requested I become his ambassador. He appointed me Nuncio of Pays d’Azur, and my life changed.”

  “How?” Nic asked, both baffled and intrigued. He would think the elevation in status—acting as the king’s messenger to the court in Côte Nazze—would be dizzying in its scope. “Surely not for the worse.”

  The father and daughter looked at each other. Nic’s eyes darted between them as he strained to make out the mute conversation they seemed to be having. “Much for the worse,” Jacopo said at last. His shoulders sagged. “Not long after I took the appointment, I was approached by people in the know who suggested … nothing concrete, mind you … that my predecessor’s demise might not have been as accidental as it was said.”

  “Accidental?” Nic shook his head. “You mean he was … ?”

  “Murdered.” Darcy’s light voice should have been too sweet for such a harsh word. She sent shivers up Nic’s spine, though. “Pushed down a flight of marble stairs in the nuncio’s residence.”

  “By whom?” Nic wanted to know. “Surely not anyone in the court?”

  “Oh no. No, no, no.” Jacopo laughed uneasily. “He had made enemies, we were told. Debt collectors.” Jacopo reached out a hand to settle his daughter, who was stoking the fire with the tongs again. “Afterward, we began to notice certain things. A great deal of floor wax on the marble, for example. A bottle of wine that had been unstoppered and discolored.”

  “A poisonous snake in my father’s chambers. And a fire in the nuncial house.”

  Nic looked aghast. “All that?”

  “Yes,” agreed Jacopo. To Nic, he said, “And then there was another incident that put all others to shame.”

  “Why not come out and say it, old man? There was an assassin.” Darcy’s voice was flat.

  “Our lives have been lived on edge for many months. Then yes, there was an assassination attempt. My daughter did not take it well.” Nic felt a sudden stab of sympathy for the girl. He’d thought her cold and hard. Perhaps she had to be, with her father’s life in constant danger. “So we left,” Jacopo continued. “I told our household that my daughter and I were taking a month in the countryside, to settle our nerves. A trusted servant helped us gain passage on a craft from Côte Nazze sailing for Cassaforte. A mere sailboat, really—a pleasure craft that had belonged to one of the Azurite aristocracy. My plan was to report back to King Alessandro and beg him to relieve me of my duties, so that my daughter would be assured her father might live for a little while more, at least.” He reached out and stroked his daughter’s hair. She, in turn, returned his affectionate gesture with a sunny beam that exposed all her teeth. After a moment in which they basked in each other’s smiles, they both turned to Nic.

  “Of course, signor,” said Nic, inclining his head to them both. Inwardly, however, his heart thudded. For a little over a year now, he had been spectator to many a drama on the stage. He could tell when someone was acting. “Yet how came you to this island?”

  “Oh.” Jacopo seemed surprised he’d skipped over that part of the narrative. “Of course. There was a storm …”

  “We lost the wind …” Darcy began to say at the same time as her father. Panic-stricken, she stopped talking.

  “There was a storm and you lost the wind?” Nic asked, cocking his head. He felt even more uneasy.

  “There was a storm,” Jacopo said, slowly and carefully, as he watched his daughter’s reaction. “We lost the good wind, then found ourselves stranded.”

  “And your boat?”

  Darcy looked stricken, somehow. She turned her head to conceal her emotions. “Gone,” said Jacopo. It was obvious he wished to bring the story to a
hasty close. “But surely I’ve convinced you that returning to Cassaforte as quickly as possible is in all of our best interests.”

  Nic nodded gravely. Jacopo and Darcy Colombo had convinced him indeed—convinced him that they were lying, at any rate. Little of their story added up. Their conflicting tales about how they’d come to be stranded were only part of it. Why, for example, would a debt collector carry on a vendetta against an ambassador, much less murder him? And why would the same debt collector attempt the same with a man of no blood relation to his predecessor? Perhaps parts of the story had been cobbled together from half-truths. It was obvious that Darcy was highly protective of her father. Something must have happened to frighten them both.

  “Of course,” Nic murmured, trying to seem understanding. In the near-darkness, his face gave away none of his misgivings. “But perhaps rescue might be closer at hand than we thought,” he said, suddenly inspired. Once convinced he had the Colombos’ full attention, he explained. “There was a man from Pays d’Azur who boarded the Pride of Muro at Massina. His name was …” Nic pretended to think. “Dumond?”

  Oh, yes. The white lie had the exact effect as he’d thought it might. Darcy ceased her restless fidgeting and sat still. If it had not been so dark, Nic might have been able to see how white her skin had gone. Jacopo, too, froze. He drew in one very long and raspy breath. “Dumond?” he finally asked. “It’s a common enough name in that country.”

  “He was quite tall,” Nic said. “He wore a blue military coat with gold braid, insignia upon his shoulders, and sported a mole upon his cheekbone. He was looking for someone. Cassaforteans, he said. Perhaps the court at Côte Nazze was worried at your disappearance and dispatched him to assure your safety?”

  Nic was not mistaken in his suspicions. Jacopo quelled whatever his daughter was about to say with one raised finger. “Oh,” he said, weighing his words carefully. “That sounds very much like the Comte Dumond. I wouldn’t say he was concerned about us, though. I doubt he’s even heard of our departure. No,” he continued, his voice gaining in strength as he spun the tale, “the Comte Dumond is a high officer in the navy of Pays d’Azur. An ambitious man. But no, he wouldn’t be interested in the pair of us, not at all.”