Eric Flint: This Rough Magic

But all the old man said was "Manfred!" with a face full of woe.

The messenger bearing dispatches from the Emperor to Francesca de Chevreuse only took ten days, and that was by spending imperial gold like water. A brief thaw and then a vicious freeze had made the roads full of iron-hard ridges and ruts… which was still better than fetlock-deep mud.

Francesca looked at the imperial seal-and the scrawl. Well, the Imperial tutors probably hadn't beaten him for untidiness.

She grimaced. One had to wonder what vagaries of imperial policy had stemmed from some terrified official doing his best to interpret this handwriting. It really was difficult. Looking carefully, though, she could see that was in part due to a definite tremor in the hand of the writer. Perhaps the rumors about the Emperor's health had some substance after all.

Francesca looked out over Copenhagen and the Sound. The water was gray, bleak, wind-chopped. She'd been out earlier, wearing her beautiful sable coat and muff. Her new venture into vertical diplomacy instead of the horizontal kind still required appearances. Even though, as the prince's leman, she was strictly off-limits, men could be just as foolish when flirting as they could in bed. More so, sometimes; in bed, they weren't trying to impress a woman with their brains.

So she needed to look as good, if not more so, than she had as one of the most sought-after courtesans in Venice. That, alas, meant keeping up with her rigorous exercise regime. The air had been biting cold and full of the dusty smell of coming snow.

Just the time for a little venture into the Norse wilderness. Ah, well. What the Emperor wanted…

The Emperor would get. Besides, she was a little worried herself about the lack of communication from Manfred.

She sat down at her writing desk and sharpened her quill. Then, in a hand that was both beautiful and legible, penned several letters. She shook the sand off them, and tinkled a delicate glass-and-silver bell. Poor little Heinrich could go out in the cold and deliver these.

Winter in the Republic of Venice was not as bleak as winter in the Holy Roman Empire. It was still wet and cold, which made repair work a little more difficult than at other times.

This fact was relevant. The Casa Montescue was busy getting a facelift. True, the great house of Montescue was technically bankrupt twice over, but that was a good reason to do it now. "If we don't do it," said Lodovico Montescue calmly to his granddaughter Katerina, "everyone will think we are down to our last ducat."

Kat shook her head at him, smiling. "But Grandpapa, we are down to our last ducat!" She couldn't bring herself to be hugely worried about it. Come financial ruin or any other disaster, she had Marco. And it seemed, now that the feud between Valdosta and Montescue was finally healed, that Lodovico Montescue, once the Colleganza-genius of Venice, had found his verve once again.

He chucked her chin. "Cara mia, if we have the place looking too shabby, then we'll have our creditors on our necks. Watch. We start spending money, they'll back off. We've got political connections, even if not business. Something will turn up."

She shook her head and sighed at him, but without the despair that had plagued her, waking and sleeping, for so many years. "All that worries me is where the money to pay for this lot is going to come from."

"If need be, we'll borrow it," he said, making Kat raise her eyes. "But watch. Things will begin to right themselves." He stretched out his big, liver-spotted hands and looked at the slightly bulbous knuckles. "Marco has not come yet?"

"He said he'd be here by the terce bell." Kat felt the warmth of knowing this lift her.

"Good." Lodovico nodded his satisfaction. "I want him to work on these old hands again. I'll swear that boy of yours has magic in his fingers, never mind his skills as a doctor."

"He is going to be great physician!" said Kat defensively, trying very hard not to think about the other things that he was. Magician, for one. Vehicle for-something else-for another.

Lodovico chuckled. "I don't disagree with you, girl. I'm becoming very fond of the boy myself. How is the annulment of that marriage of his going?"

Kat made a face; this was the one shadow on her days, for she and Marco could not wed until he had been rid of the wife-in-name-only he had taken out of a misplaced sense of honor and obligation to his benefactor, his wife's brother Petro Dorma. "Slowly. That Angelina! One moment it's a nunnery, and becoming a saint…"

Lodovico snorted with laughter. "Saint Puttana. I'll believe all the girls in the House of the Red Cat turned Siblings first."

Kat grinned, in spite of herself. "You shouldn't use language like that in front of me, Grandpapa. Anyway, one minute she's all set on being a saint and a martyr. The next she's screaming at poor Petro that he wants to lock her away."

"And if you didn't hate her guts you might almost feel sorry for her," said her grandfather, still amused.

Kat shook her head at him. "She was, and is, a spoiled, selfish brat. And stupid on top of it. She got herself pregnant and got poor Marco to claim it was his to save her face, and then tried to run away with her lover anyway! And she's still trying to manipulate things in her own favor, no matter what that does to people around her. And yes, I sometimes hate her. But at least I haven't taken out an assassination contract on her head."

Lodovico acknowledged the hit with a wry smile. "I was wrong that time. And Marco and Benito lived through it. Besides, if she delays any more with this annulment I wouldn't bet on you not doing just the same."

They were in a small salon just off the front hall, and thus the pounding of the great Lion-headed knocker was easily audible.

Lodovico chuckled. "He's eager, this young man of yours. Early, too."

A faint frown creased Kat's brow. That was a very forceful knocking. She'd come down to wait for Marco often enough to know he used the knocker tentatively. Maybe… bad news. Or good news, finally, about the annulment of his marriage to Angelina. She hastened out into the hallway.

White-haired old Giuseppe had not announced the visitor, because he was gaping at the two of them. They were… enormous. They loomed over Giuseppe in the way that the Church of Saint Hypatia Hagia Sophia loomed over the square outside it. Giuseppe and Kat would have been terrified, had the two blond giants not looked like two very lost little boys, crushing fur hats in their hands, hoping for a welcome.

"Pardon," said one, in Italian so atrocious that only familiarity with Erik Hakkonsen's accent enabled Kat to understand him. "But is this the dwelling of the family Montescue?"

"It is," said Kat, blinking at him. It wasn't just the accents of these-boys?-that was outlandish. It was every inch of them, clad as they were in garments like nothing she had ever seen before. Oh, in part, they resembled some sort of Norselander or Icelander; Venice saw enough of those coming in and out of their ports. But not all their garments were fur and homespun woolen. They also rejoiced in leather leggings with fringes of a kind that no Icelander had ever boasted, and there were beads and feathers braided into their hair, which was shaven on the sides, but long everywhere else. And in sheathes at their sides, each of them wore a weapon that Kat recognized. Erik Hakkonsen favored that kind of little axe or hatchet-a tomahawk, it was called.

"Ah, good." The speaker's face cleared. "And is the clan chieftain here? Chief-Lodi-Ludo-"

"Blessed Jesu, boy, don't mangle my name further!" Lodovico growled, as he limped into the hallway. "I am Lodovico Montescue, of Casa Montescue. Who the devil are you?"