Bespi. You carry my curse. Do you wish to be free of it?
A low moan came from his throat.
My curse shall follow you wherever you go. Her eyes grew until they filled his entire field of vision, black and like looking into hell. He felt ghostly hands running down his arms, leaving chill trails behind them. When you sleep, I shall be there—waiting. When you wake, I shall follow; in all your comings, in all your goings, I shall be one step behind you, making you careless, making you nervous, until one day you will make a mistake—then my fingers will close about your throat—
“Wait!” he yelled. Panic snatched at him now. Dread he had never felt in dealing with the living, or the soon-to-be-dead, closed around his heart and squeezed it like an invisible hand reaching through his chest-wall. He panted. Whimpered . . . “I’ll do anything you want!”
The eyes receded and again she floated before him in her cloud of smoke and hair and magic. Then guard my sons.
That caught him off guard. “Huh?” he replied stupidly, unable to fathom the puzzle.
My sons live, Harrow. Bespi who was. Guard them. Guard them well. Keep them from harm. Keep the Montagnards from their throats. Only then my curse will leave you.
“I don’t—I mean I don’t even know what they look like. How . . . how do I find them!”
There—she pointed and something began forming out of the smoke and the dark beside her. The foggy image of an adolescent—sixteen, seventeen, maybe. A dead ringer for Lorendana. That is Marco.
Bespi/Harrow gasped as he recognized the boy. The one who had killed Gianni! The boy with the great reasons! Harrow could now understand why he had been witness to the sight.
And there—
Beside the first, a boy about two years younger; Carlo Sforza as a kid.
That is Benito. Guard them, Harrow. Your life on it, or you will carry my curse forever.
He had barely sworn to it, when she faded away and his grasp on consciousness went with her.
* * *
Luciano was well pleased with himself. That had been one of the better vision-quests he’d sent Harrow on. The former assassin hadn’t fought him, he had responded beautifully to all the suggestions. He hoped the sending of Marco’s brother was right. He’d only seen the boy once, but somehow it had seemed a good touch. These were just small magics, true. But he did not dare to try greater magic than this. Not without calling the sort of attention that he didn’t want onto himself.
Harrow came around gradually. He wasn’t a particularly pretty sight, with half his head scarred and the rest of him splotchy with burned skin. He coughed a good deal too: a gift from the smoke and the water he’d breathed in. But he was functional; indeed, he’d healed better and faster than Luciano had thought likely. The new vessel of the Goddess sat up slowly, uncurling from his nest of reeds and rags and old blankets. He blinked at the sun, and then at Luciano, his dilated eyes not focusing properly.
“Well?” asked Luciano.
“I got—a thing—I got to do,” the man said through stiff lips, eyes still hazed with the drug.
“The Goddess gave you a task, huh?”
“But I don’t—I don’t—I got to take care of a couple of children—” His pupils were still dilated, but there was a certain despair in his voice. Luciano kept his satisfaction shuttered behind his own stony expression as he crouched down next to Harrow in the reeds.
“So?”
“But—how the hell am I going find her children?”
“What children? Whose children?”
“Valdosta. Marco and Benito Valdosta.” If Harrow was confused about why the Goddess would be concerned over the welfare of Lorendana’s two children, he wasn’t showing it. But then Harrow had never been strong on logic. “How the hell am I going to find them?”
Luciano spread his arms wide with his hands palm-upwards and looked to the sky, taking on dignity and power as he deepened his voice. This was the part he played the best— He knew, thanks to another very minor piece of magic, that the former Montagnard assassin now saw him haloed in a haze of dim white light. Every time he took that particular pose, Harrow would see him glowing with the power of the Goddess. “Praise be the Goddess. Blessed are the vessels of her will. Her ways are beyond all mortal understanding.”