Read The Damiano Series for Free Online Page B

their escape. And it was costing him energy to keep her invisible.
    He hesitated to call out for her, because invisible was not the same as inaudible. Painfully, Damiano squinted up the stairs into the darkness of the house.
    There came a scream, followed shortly by a curse, and then the guard at the door fell flat on the stucco landing, bellowing. Macchiata’s squat form scuttled down the stairs and past Damiano. He had to run to keep up.
    â€œI bit them both, Master!” she panted, exultant. “I bit both soldiers and old Marco, too! Three in one day.” Suddenly she came to a stop, turned, and threw herself, slobbering, upon her winded master.
    â€œOh, Master, I have never been so happy! This war is wonderful.”
    Damiano could not spare breath to disagree.
    Â 
    Chapter 3
    The moon rose just before sunset. It hung as invisible behind the slate clouds as Damiano had been to old Marco at the well. But Damiano knew where it was, out of a knowledge so accustomed he didn’t know whether it was his father’s blood in him or his father’s training. He always knew where the moon was; he could have pointed to it. The five planets came harder, but he had a feeling for them, also. Even with peripatetic Mercury he was usually right,
    Though Damiano’s eyes were faulty in daylight, he had a compensating ability to make use of moonlight, even moonlight behind clouds. For most of the month he could read without candlelight and could perceive things in the dark that most people could never see at all (nor did they want to). The full of the moon also tended to sharpen his other senses and put his feelings into a roil.
    Guillermo Delstrego had liked to say that male witches were like women, with their monthly cycles. It was a joke Damiano had found in the worst taste.
    Tonight the moon was at her third quarter, waning. Damiano felt as dull and heavy as a water-soaked log. For the past three nights he had tended the batch of tonic, sitting on a hard-backed chair so that he could not doze off for more than an hour at a time. The mixture had been ready this morning, and Damiano had bathed and gone immediately back to the workroom for his lesson with Raphael. He would not be able to walk the night through.
    Besides, to the vetch field it was two and a half days’ march. How did the citizens do it, with old women and babies, and Alfonso Berceuse with his one leg?
    The road into the hills was also the road to Aosta—good and wide, open almost all the year. Why hadn’t he heard? Why hadn’t someone told him? It was sad that they would all go off and not think of Damiano, alone without family or servants, sitting up and brewing medicine for their sakes.
    Damiano was swept with self-pity. He hated to be forgotten. And he couldn’t bear the thought they had left him behind on purpose. And now three toes on his right foot had no feeling at all.
    But Father Antonio would not have left him behind on purpose. Since Delstrego’s death Father Antonio had been very kind to Damiano and had spent long evening hours with him in the parlor of the rectory—the good father felt constrained to avoid the Delstrego tower, though he knew Damiano worked no impieties there—drinking spiced wine and talking about sanctity and Holy Mother Church. It was a subject about which Father Antonio seemed to know much more than anyone else Damiano had met. More than did Raphael, for instance. Father Antonio was the sort who never forgot anyone— not the least of his parishioners, in their good fortune or bad. If he had left without Damiano, it was because he had believed Damiano to be gone already.
    And why not? Damiano hadn’t set foot outside for three days, nor let a candle shine, nor lit any fire save that under the caldron. There was no need for him to feel neglected.
    Still, forgotten or no, he had to sleep. Damiano lifted his eyes to the rounded hills on either side of the road. Immaculate, white,