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“I did,” she conceded with the ghost of a smile.
Fiore returned it. Then, as she seemed to prefer silence to conversation, he resumed his visual study of the felze interior’s intricate scale-patterned serpentine carvings, with occasional glances out the latticed window.
The gondola continued winding on through the canals until, quite all of a sudden, it left them behind altogether for the open lagoon.
Fiore had travelled widely and freely throughout Halcyon ever since his arrival more than a decade hence. But he had never yet departed it. A queer dread he hadn’t anticipated crept up the nape of his neck now. Instinct bid him look over his shoulder at the city vanishing into the mist in the reverse of how it had appeared as if by magic out of the aether the first time he’d ever beheld it.
Yet, as he sat facing the gondola’s aft, with Carlotta in the reverse seat facing him, he reined in this instinct to a mere twitch he could brush off as a slight chill. He didn’t want her to see him looking back. He must seem worthy of her master and not like a coward or rustic.
Carlotta, meanwhile, appeared to take no notice of his inner struggle and instead cast her own mild-verging-on-disinterested gaze out across the lagoon.
Fiore likewise didn’t look back when the gondola reached a dock on the mainland. If a departure was an arrival in reverse, then he couldn’t imagine the city from this distance would look any differently than it had over a decade earlier; nothing but a cluster of fog clouds, assuming he could even perceive anything at all this far out.
A carriage awaited them at the dock. Shellacked black, fully enclosed, with the dragon crest carved in bas-relief on the doors, four wheels, and four horses to draw it.
Fiore hadn’t seen a horse since he’d left his ancestral home behind. He’d quite forgotten how tall they were.
Carlotta ushered him into the carriage. Like the felze, it was done up all in black, though with velvet upholstery rather than leather. As she’d done in the gondola, Carlotta took the seat opposite him, with her back to the horses. A folded furred blanket and velvet pillow lay on the seat beside him. A picnic hamper sat on the floor.
“We won’t be stopping for dinner,” she said when his curious gaze lingered on the hamper. “Straight on through the night. With any luck we’ll arrive before mid-day tomorrow.”
That explained the pillow and blanket as well, then.
Carlotta rapped the roof of the carriage just as she’d done for the gondola. It lurched off with far less grace and ran along far less smoothly. The rattle of wheels and rumbling of hooves resounded. Fiore braced himself against the velvet cushion and took in the swaying scenery through the carriage window. The seaside became pastoral countryside not unlike Tiziano’s capricci, minus the fantastical creatures and epic ruins. Then trees and hills arose around them as they entered a wooded valley. The sun sank to the west.
When the sky turned a particular shade of purple, the carriage stopped. Carlotta broke open the hamper and proffered wine, bread, and cheese for Fiore’s perusal, which he eagerly accepted. This done, they both got out, at Carlotta’s suggestion, to stretch their legs. The ride resumed within the quarter-hour. Night fell, leaving only the lanterns suspended from the carriage itself to aid the full moon in illuminating their journey forward. Against all odds, Fiore fell asleep.
He awoke to find the pale blue light of dawn peeking through the curtains. Yet this hadn’t roused him. Rather, the carriage had halted. Carlotta remained seated before him in exactly the same posture as she’d held the previous evening. Fiore wondered if she, too, had slept or sat up like a gargoyle all night.
“Wolf’s Head?” Fiore asked.
“Not quite,” Carlotta replied. “We’re changing the horses.”
Fiore supposed fresh steeds would go faster and further than those who’d dragged the carriage through the night.
Carlotta opened the carriage door to reveal an inn surrounded by pines. Fog rolled across the ground, colder than what drifted through the canals and alleys of Halcyon. Fiore stepped out and beheld the carriage-driver strapping black horses into their harnesses—different black horses, if he took Carlotta’s word for it. Within the inn itself they had just enough time to gulp down coffee whilst the innkeeper pretended she was too worldly to stare at her strange guests who’d arrived in a ducal carriage. Then back into the carriage they went and lurched off again, deeper into the mountains.
The dark forest looming ever-higher all around them ought to have disturbed him, but Fiore found himself more intrigued than otherwise by his new surroundings. A narrow path led them higher and higher until a particular curve let the window pass by a break in the trees to reveal a castle perched on a peak.
“Is that…?” Fiore asked before he could stop himself from sounding like such a rube.
“Yes,” Carlotta replied in her matter-of-fact manner.
Fiore stared until the forest shifted to block the castle from his sight again. Its image lingered in his mind long after, appearing like a shade before the dark shadows of the trees. What had once been a medieval fortress built around an ancient temple had since grown into a pleasure palace of exquisite modern architecture with high towers flung out in all directions on spiraling columns. Its enormity overshadowed any edifice Fiore had ever seen within the bounds of the city, save for perhaps the temple to Belenos. He glimpsed it again and again through gaps in the trees as the road wound back and forth up the steep hill, until at last they reached the bridge leading through wrought-iron gates as tall as theKingfisher’s mast into the palace courtyard itself. A towering hedge encircled the carriage drive, thick as any stone wall. A draconic fountain in the center proved the sole decoration. The austerity forced one to appreciate the smaller details of carved scales and sinewy form. But as the carriage halted, Fiore just felt trapped between the high pointed arch of the hunting lodge’s enormous doubled doors and the shriek of the wrought-iron gates clattering shut across the path behind them.
It didn’t help that, contrary to his expectations of a grand party, their carriage remained alone in the drive.
What struck Fiore most as he stepped down from the carriage onto the gravel was the silence. The carriage—with its creaking springs, rattling wheels, clinking harness, shuffling horses—and its occupants seemed to make the only sounds in the courtyard aside from the intermittent wind whistling through the trees.
One might attribute the curious quietude to the natural stillness of the countryside compared to the bustling city. Even so, Fiore would have expected to find the human presence within and without the castle itself in the midst of the inherent chaos of a hunting party or ball—or at the very least, the chaos of arranging some sort of celebratory entertainment.
And yet the hush prevailed with an almost sepulchral quality as the doors groaned inward to allow him entrance into a vast and echoing foyer.
For the first time since his unexpected journey began, Fiore considered the possibility that he might not have been summoned for festive purposes.
Nevertheless, Carlotta led on, and Fiore saw no path forward but to follow her.
The dark and moody interior reminded Fiore of Enzo’s customary garb—minus the brightening warmth of Enzo’s smiling eyes. Carlotta showed him up a vast spiraling staircase carved of black marble, its banister yet another coiling serpent. Fiore glimpsed what he thought might be the shadows of servants scuttling out of sight as he passed through the floors. Then Carlotta broke away from the stairs to take him down a corridor lined with suits of armor toward a particular door carved with the same noble crest that adorned her own livery.
