The Bishop of Rome. Yes, Father Rodrigo’s message. The one he hoped to deliver to the Pope.
He watched her face as she spoke. She was a scrappy little thing, younger than he, but he could not guess by how much. She was too bony and petite to have noticeable breasts, even if she was mature. Her hair was a color common enough in these parts, but her skin was at least as pale as a Northerner. In the hazy morning light, she looked like a tündér, a fairy of his homeland. Not a szépasszony, of course—a fair woman, the most beautiful of supernatural beings—but even the woodland fairies, although prone to mischief, treated you right if you stuck with them.
And this one had certainly already proven her good intentions—as well as, arguably, magic powers. He was not frightened of fairies. If she was, indeed, a tündér, she would eventually reveal that she knew a language he understood—the proper language of fairies.
She stopped talking and looked at him with a far-too-patient sigh. He realized, sheepishly, that he had been staring at her with a stupidly vacant expression.
She glanced up toward the heavens and muttered something; it struck him as an apology to someone absent. Perhaps someone on high. Her own gods? Then she sighed once more and firmly pressed her small, bony right hand against his sternum. Her fingers were dirty and pale and her nails ragged—more ragged than his own, which was saying something.
He was distracted by her hair. He shook his head as she started to speak, and reached out for a gnarled knot of hair. He had thought it was simply dirty and matted, much like his after weeks of traveling, but that wasn’t the case. Her hair had been knotted very specifically, in a way that seemed familiar.
Gasping, he glanced around at the straw, looking vainly for the straw Rodrigo, until he remembered it had fallen apart. He bent and scooped up another long stick of straw and tried to remember the knot she had tied in the hay. It was familiar, of course, because he had seen his mother tie it. It was a basic hitch, used for horses and sacks—the sort of knot one tied unconsciously, when wanting to restrain something momentarily.
Ocyrhoe watched his clumsy fingers with a pitched expression, and as he finished, her eyes widened. She grabbed his hands, holding his wrists tight, and held the knotted straw between them. She squeezed his wrists, several times, her fingers moving in a complex pattern against his skin.
“Yes,” he cried when he realized he understood the rhythm of her pressure. It was tündér magic. “Yes,” he said. “Kin-knot.”
She smiled like sun breaking through a cloud, showing healthy ivory teeth. Just hearing his tone, she understood that he understood. She laughed and squeezed his wrists again.
I know you.
16
Exterge Lutum Oculorum Meorum, Ut Videam
THE CARDINALS WERE like the squirrels in the parks in Paris: they pretended indifference, but as soon as there was a hint they might be fed, they grew animated and friendly. The cardinals milled about in the odd, shadowy courtyard of the Septizodium, attempting to warm themselves in the morning air—and not succeeding. The sun, while risen, had not yet climbed to such a height that its face could look down on the trampled grass of the Septizodium’s interior.
It was, as Colonna had said, a four-walled chamber, open to the sky, but with no visible means of entrance or exit. Other than the rectangular door cut into one of the walls near the base. Rodrigo understood the nature of their confinement now. The Septizodium was their prison and yet was still nothing more than a facade. The cardinals were seemingly imprisoned in this box, but from their vantage point, the Septizodium was simply the way they communicated with the outside world. Their real prison was the confused mass of tunnels and fractured corridors that honeycombed the ruins surrounding the historic facade.
Rinaldo Conti de Segni had sought to lead Rodrigo out to the center of the Septizodium, but Rodrigo had hung back, preferring to remain in the gloom still clinging to the walls. The others were gathered in the open space, and Rodrigo was not quite ready to meet all of them. For the moment, he wanted to assess them without undue influence, without the sort of manhandling that he had suffered at Capocci’s hands.
He was uncomfortably aware that the group was aware of his presence and they were also assessing him. Your vote may well decide the election.
He did not understand why God had sent him here—on a fool’s errand—and the only explanation that made any sense to him was that God was not yet done with him. Perhaps God was giving him direction, even now, through the words of these men. What better way to discover a worthy recipient of God’s message than to be instrumental in his elevation?
In the courtyard, the buffoons, as de Segni referred to them—Capocci and Colonna—had met Robert of Somercotes, the man whom Rodrigo had seen first after awakening last night. Somercotes nodded to Rodrigo; Rodrigo, uncomfortably aware of how much he did not know about everything going on around him, thought it must mean something that Somercotes and those two were friendly with each other—but what? He had no idea.