The Damiano Series by R. A. MacAvoy Read Free Book Online

they seemed to give off their own faint light. Damiano knew this landscape with a child’s minute memory. He remembered that the hill with a lump on the side of it, three back from the road, concealed a long, skinny cave, dry for most its length. He remembered also that from the top of that hill one could see Partestrada down in the cup of the valley, where the Evançon ran under this road. He had stood there in summer twilight and watched the lamps twinkle through the soft air.
    Plunging into the snow-sprinkled gorse at the side of the road, he looked at his footsteps behind him. There was no need to concern himself with covering them over. The wind was doing that. The tiny toe-dimples of Macchiata’s progress were half obscured already.
    A good thing, too. Damiano wasn’t sure he had the strength left to work a wind spell. “How are your feet, Macchiata?” he asked the dog, his words coming slurred through frozen lips. She replied that she couldn’t remember, which was probably meant as a joke, although with Macchiata one never knew for sure. He heard her behind him, bulling her way through the low shrubbery.
    At the top of the hill he stood and looked down, gripping his staff as tightly as his clumsy hands allowed. There was a light in the valley: one smoky firelight where there should have been dozens. The wind billowed his mantle out before him, and the ermine lining glimmered brighter than snow. There was no sound but the wind and the crackle of his breath, along with the heavier, warmer sound of the dog’s breathing.
    Already he felt removed from Partestrada, both in distance and in time. His removal had been surgically quick, but as he considered now, quite thorough. All the strings that bound him to his home had been cut: Carla was gone ahead, and both Macchiata and the lute were portable. Damiano felt an unwarranted lump in his throat— unwarranted because, after all, he was not leaving Partestrada forever, but just for so long as it took him to find his people, and to do something about this General Pardo. Perhaps two weeks, he estimated.
    He clambered down from the crest of the hill, poking amid the dry growth with the heel of his staff”, looking for the mouth of the cave he remembered.
    It was still there. Crouching down he crawled into it, his hands smarting against frozen earth.
    Inside there was no wind, and the rivulet that had created the cave was frozen on the floor of it like a broken silver chain. He inched over it. Macchiata slid behind.
    There, as he remembered it, was the hole in the wall: an egg-shaped chamber that had been the perfect size for a boy alone to play in. It was tighter for the grown Damiano and his lute, and tighter still when Macchiata squirmed in, curling between his nose and knees. The staff would not fit in at all, but he laid it along the lip of the chamber with its silver head hanging in. He touched this, mumbling three words in Hebrew, and it gave off enough light for him to arrange the furry mantle between his body and the stone.
    â€œThis is not too bad,” he whispered to the red spot on Macchiata’s withers. She grunted in reply.
    He let the light go out. “Tell me, little lady, did you see anyone come near the house while I was tending the kettle? Did anybody perhaps stop and look for a light in the windows, and then pass by?”
    Macchiata squirmed sleepily. “I saw many people go by, and horses and carriages, too. All the dogs of the city, I think. They wanted me to come with them; they said it would be fun. —But of course I didn’t.
    â€œAlso somebody knocked on the door one day. Not today. I don’t remember when.”
    â€œAhh!” Damiano lifted his head. “Father Antonio?”
    Macchiata yawned. “No. That Carla with the blond hair.”
    Damiano’s skull struck the stone roof of the chamber, but that didn’t distract him from his joy. “Carla Denezzi, at my door? Why