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  “Ever done it before?” the lord asked him. “Ever talked a band of dancers into quietness?”

  “No,” Luca said. “I am a new Inquirer. I’d never even seen dancers before yesterday. My clerk Brother Peter thinks they are possessed.”

  The lord frowned, tipped his head on one side, and looked at Luca as if he were a colt in the field, a yearling that might make a good horse, or could remain skinny and irresolute.

  “Ever commanded men in battle? Seen any fighting?”

  Luca shook his head. “The Ottoman slavers raided my village when I was a boy, but I wasn’t there.”

  “Nobody would have fought them, anyway,” the lord commented shrewdly. “I’ve yet to see a Christian army stand before the infidel. If the young Count Vlad can make his men do it, way over in Wallachia, he will be the very first. God bless him and make him brutal. Constantinople only held out for so long because it couldn’t run away.”

  “They took my father and my mother,” Luca said stiffly. “I should have fought. If I had been there when they came, I think I would have fought them, for my mother’s life. I hope I would not have let them go without doing anything.”

  Lord Vargarten nodded, and dropped a hand on Luca’s shoulder in rough sympathy. “So it goes,” he said. “But the truth is that until today you have neither converted an enemy nor fought one?”

  “I have seen some strange things and reported on them. Terrifying things.”

  “But not a man of action.”

  “No,” Luca admitted.

  “Then take my word for it. It’s easier to drive someone away than talk to them. Almost anything is easier than talking honestly and openly to someone,” Lord Vargarten said bluntly. “My wife’s view that we should drown them in the river is one that most people would share, and it’s the quickest and simplest thing to do. And the end is certain and final—and, like most men, I like a final solution.”

  “But you are the lord of these people,” Luca said earnestly. “You have to do the right thing, not the certain thing.”

  The lord laughed shortly. “Where in the world have you come from? Where have you seen a man be a good lord against his own convenience and interest? Everyone does what is easiest and best for himself in this world, lords and beggars alike. Why should anyone do anything for anyone else?”

  “Because you are rich,” Luca said simply. “You have been educated. You have power. You have been blessed by God; you are like a shepherd with sheep. You have to lead them to safety. You owe them guidance in return for their service to you. Surely you want to be a good lord, not just a powerful one?”

  Lord Vargarten laughed shortly. “The people mean nothing to me, and most lords feel the same. They are like sheep, just as you say—the beasts that I shear for wool, the animals that I slaughter for meat. They are like the barley that I harvest for grain, or the earth that I plow. My tenants are my own, bought and sold with the land, and I keep them in their hovels as I keep my other beasts in the field or woods. When I die, my son will rule them, and my grandson will rule their grandsons. They are inherited with the fields, like ditches; they are my own, like my hounds.”

  “No, you are wrong—times are changing,” Luca persisted. “Since the Great Pestilence, people believe that they should be allowed to go where they want, and work as they wish. They want to work for themselves, and think for themselves and dream for themselves.”

  “Fools,” Lord Vargarten said shortly. “Why would anyone change anything to oblige them? I certainly won’t.” He gestured at the guards, who, though ragged and illequipped, were as ready as they were going to be. “While I can command a hundred men, there will be no changes in my lands. And I will always command a hundred men for there will always be a hundred ready to serve me, for no pay, for nothing more than their dinner—if only because their fathers served my father and their grandfathers served my grandfather, for no pay and nothing but their dinner, and these are fools who can imagine nothing else. I am their lord—d’you understand? They follow me so that they don’t have to think. They like a leader so that they don’t have to think for themselves. And I make sure that nobody like you ever comes here with your ideas from the outside world and encourages them to think anything different from me.”

  “You’re wrong,” Luca said again, earnestly. “People do want to think for themselves: there is the new learning, the new philosophies.”

  The lord laughed harshly, hawked and spat on the ground. “You’re a dreamer,” he said. “Some things are eternal. There is a master and a man; a man and his dog; these things will never change. Now, are you ready to ride with me and rid my town of these dancers?”

  “No,” Luca said boldly. “I have to insist. In the name of my holy Order and the Pope who commissioned me, I demand that you hold the dancers peacefully and let me speak with them. They must be given a choice to give up dancing before you drive them from the town.”

  “Priest, you are making a simple job ten times more difficult,” the lord complained. “And you said yourself, you know nothing about this. I can get the job done and finished by dinnertime and only a score of fools dead and none of us hurt. Who cares for them?”

  “I know,” Luca said with a smile. “But I have a lord too, and He said that though two sparrows are sold for a farthing not one of them falls to the ground without Our Father knowing it.”

  “Good God, what has that to do with anything?” his lordship demanded, irritated. “Sparrows? Who cares about sparrows?”

  “Christ the Redeemer cares about sparrows.”

  “I swear by the saints that He does not! Is it Sunday? Am I in church? Did the bell ring for Terce and I missed it?”

  Luca smiled. “Lord Vargarten, I am bound to ask that you make a simple job more difficult and not drive these poor people into the river, but let me try to persuade them to go to their homes. Let me see if God will show mercy and give them back their wits.”

  “Mount up!” the lord bellowed to those of his men who had horses. To Luca he said, “Come on then! See what you can do with these vermin before I whip them halfway to Vienna.”

  The peddler doubled back on himself, reentered through the open doorway to the inn, and ran up the deserted stairs to the girls’ empty bedroom. He ignored the lumpy saddlebags, but opened the long box at the foot of the bed and pushed aside their gowns and capes to see if there was anything laid beneath them. He ignored the chink of coins in one of the bags, but when he saw a glint of steel he gave a little grunt of satisfaction, and unwrapped and drew out Isolde’s father’s broadsword from its hiding place. He could not mistake it—Isolde’s brother had described it minutely to him: the ornate handle bolting the blade into the scabbard so that it could never be drawn without unlocking it with the missing key, the precious stones set deep.

  “I must have it,” Isolde’s brother, the new Lord Lucretili, had told him. “I cannot claim the lordship without it.”

  The peddler drew it from the box, closed the lid, and slid it into his backpack. It stood tall above his head, so he thrust it lower, until the bottom of the scabbard knocked against the back of his legs. Then, still unseen, he went quietly down the stairs, slipped out of the open door, and was lost among the dancers.

  The castle guard could hear the sound of music from the road outside the walled town before they even entered the gate. “Close up,” the lord said. “And if any one of you starts hopping about, the man next to him is to give him the butt end of a pike in his belly and then knock him out cold. Understand?”

  “Aye,” came the grim reply as the men moved closer, shoulder to shoulder. Riding behind the guard, Luca, Freize, and Brother Peter exchanged anxious looks.

  “As long as you don’t start dancing, then you and I are safe,” Freize said quietly to his horse, Rufino, who flicked a dark ear and seemed to agree. “I will sit tight up here, and you keep your four feet steady on the ground.”

  Lord Vargarten led the horsemen at speed, four abreast through the open gate, clatt