Why would anyone attack an unimportant villa, I had asked at the time, and if it was important enough to be attacked, why wouldn’t it be defended? Just pretend, he’d said.

I climbed up and over the railing around the porch, trampling the privacy screen in the process and getting my foot stuck through it for a moment—not a part of the plan. As I rushed through the door into my mother’s rooms, the maids were screaming. I had to shout over the noise they were making, but whether she understood me or not, Ina had the sense to push shut the large wooden door at the entrance to the rooms. Someone in the hallway outside pressed the latch, and the door started to swing open, but I ran full tilt into it and slammed it closed again. There was a shout of pain from the other side, and a thump as a body struck the door. Ina grasped the latch to keep it from moving. While her small hand secured it, the metal tongue of the latch secured the door. The door shook in its frame, but it was solid, and we had as much time as the latch would give us.

Eurydice and my mother were in the room, as well as two maids. I rushed to the door that connected my mother’s room to dressing spaces and the bedchambers. There were separate doors into the bedchambers from the corridor, and I feared to see the attackers coming through them, but the dressing room was empty. I dodged through the doorway to grab a grooming set from the tray there, then shut that door and jammed its latch with the handle of a brush. I turned back to Ina. As she lifted her hand, I quickly jammed that latch as well. Everything, everything, as planned with Terve on an idle afternoon months before.

Eurydice was crouched on the floor. She’d found the wedge used to hold the door when they wanted it open and was forcing it into place to help keep the door closed. Once it was secure, I looked around. The attackers could not come at us from the porch. Only my mother’s reception room opened onto the balcony, an old-fashioned way to make sure that no daughter of the house escaped for an unlicensed glimpse of the men in the courtyard below.

My mother had hushed the maids, and in the relative quiet she said, “We heard the fighting from the porch. Darling, are they bandits?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. They were organized and all outfitted alike, and no bandits would attack a villa on Letnos. There was nothing to be stolen, and where would they go afterward? They couldn’t get off Letnos without passing the king’s ships that patrolled around it, and the patrol ships would stop anything larger than a rowboat.

The latch wasn’t going to hold long. “I want you to hide,” I told my mother, and hustled her and my sisters and the maids out onto the balcony. When I explained what I wanted, the maids balked. My mother rolled her eyes at them and calmly stepped over the railing. She waited while I climbed down to the roof below, and then she let herself drop into my arms. Eurydice positively threw herself over the railing, laughing when I caught her. Ina pointed sternly, and the maids lowered themselves gingerly, one of them wailing softly, even after I set her on her feet.

When all the women were safely down, I turned to find Eurydice standing at the edge of the roof.

“Back away,” I said, “in case they send someone out of the house.” We could still hear the hammering on my mother’s door.

Eurydice had seen the bodies on the ground, and her laughter was gone. “All the guards,” she said.

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” I said, picking up my sword from the roof. “Bend low, so no one can see you from the courtyard.” As if herding ducks, I waved them with my hand to the outside edge of the flat roof, away from the main house, toward the spot where the peaked roof above the kitchens began.

When they’d dug an icehouse a few years earlier, they’d put a door to it on the outside of the house wall, to make it easier to bring the ice in. The mound over the entranceway was just a few feet below the level of the roof. It was no difficulty to jump down and slither to the ground.

“We can go up through the olive grove to the road,” said my mother.

“No.” I shook my head again. “There might be more lookouts in the trees,” I said. It was Terve’s observation from the year before. “It will be better to hide in the icehouse until they are gone.” That was my solution. The entranceway beside us might have been bolted from the inside, but it wasn’t, because the house wasn’t defended even from thievery. There’d never been a need.

Once inside, we barred the door behind us and went down the stairs and across the straw that covered the ice. We were underneath the steward’s office. Another set of stairs led up to a door that had a lock to keep servants out of the valuable ice. It was also unlocked. The key would be hanging in the steward’s room beside the kitchen.

I told my mother, my sisters, and the maids to wait in the icehouse. I found the key and locked them in, then slid the key under the door to my mother. They were hidden, and they were safe. I went to rally the servants, and my ideal plan, painstakingly worked out with Terve, came to an immediate, ruinous end.

The kitchen, too, had its own doors to the outside, to provide easy access to the kitchen gardens and the fruit trees. The room was full of servants. Everyone who had avoided the mysterious attackers had gathered there. I looked for Malatesta and, when I didn’t see him, jumped to the worst conclusion.

There were no guards. Eurydice had been correct about the bodies she had seen. I could hear raised voices from the porch at the top of the house, and I knew that the latch on my mother’s door had given way.

I shouted over the babble in the kitchen, “We must rally here and fight our way into the main house,” and the babble was replaced by dead silence.

They looked at me like sheep. Or rather, like goats—just that look a goat gives you when it has decided not to cooperate and knows you can’t make it. Suddenly, I was me again, just me, the weakling who cried when his tutor whipped his fingers with a switch.

“We have to rally here and fight,” I said again, and my voice cracked. Some of the servants slipped out the door toward the orchards. “Won’t you fight? I’ve killed two already,” I said to those who were left. Their eyes dropped. More of them sidled out the door. From the house there was no more crashing, but more shouting. They’d found my mother’s room empty. They were fanning out again to search.

“He’s here!” The cook rushed to the door to the courtyard, shouting up toward my mother’s balcony. I lunged after him in horror. Someone grabbed at my arm, and I disengaged him with my blade. Even rusted, it bit deep. I swung it again, and those around me fell back, but the cook was still shouting to the intruders that their prize was waiting for them like a complete idiot, in the kitchen, surrounded by the people he’d thought would help him. I tried to back myself toward the door to the outside, but it was much too late to think strategically. A wall suddenly appeared on my left, rushing toward me. I turned, uncomprehending, and raised my sword, but it did little good against what turned out to be a table turned on end. By the time I understood what was happening, I was falling backward. No one, not even Pol, had ever taught me how to fight off a table.

CHAPTER TWO

I lay on the dirt, my hands tied behind me, my feet tied, and a bag over my head. The bag was coarsely woven and I could see a little through it. The day was bright. Men were moving around. If I hadn’t had something that smelled like a dishrag in my mouth, I would have cursed them. Impulses of rage swept over me, and I kicked with both feet and struggled against the ropes, but I never hit anything, and the ropes were unrelentingly tight.