A Coward in Good Standing

Chapter One: Forty-Seven and Still Breathing

The courtyard of the Baron of Coltre's winter house was so cold that the fountain had frozen mid-spit, and Marta Bellini, licensed proxy of the Guild of Satisfaction, stood in the middle of it looking magnificently unbothered.

This was a lie, like most things about her. Under the good coat she was sweating in a way that had nothing to do with exertion, and her left knee had developed a small private tremble that she had named Giulio, because it visited so often it deserved a name.

Across the frost-crusted flagstones stood her opponent: Ottavio Sperzi, proxy in good standing, forty-one engagements, a man built like a door with a moustache nailed to it. He had a two-handed sword. Marta had a rapier she had not sharpened in three years, because a sharp sword invites use.

"Bellini," said Sperzi, in the deep gravelled voice of a man who gargled with quarry dust. "They say you're undefeated."

"They do say that."

"They say you're unbeatable."

"They say a great many kind things. I encourage it."

Sperzi swung his blade in a loose circle to loosen his shoulder. The sound it made in the air was the sound of Marta's father's funeral, replayed on demand. She smiled at him with the warmth of a woman greeting an old friend at a wedding.

Registrar's deputy Bosso, wrapped in three cloaks and clearly wishing he were anywhere else, read out the grievance. The Baron of Coltre had accused the Widow Antinori of moving a boundary stone nine feet into his orchard. The Widow Antinori had accused the Baron of Coltre of being a man who counted plums. Neither of them would fight, because no nobleman in the kingdom of Alvara had bled on his own behalf in three hundred years. That was what proxies were for. That was the entire architecture of Alvaran society: a nobility that had outsourced its courage the way it outsourced its laundry.

"Champions," said Bosso, teeth chattering, "to first blood or surrender. The Codex of Satisfaction observes."

The Baron and the Widow sat under separate awnings with hot wine, twelve feet apart, refusing to look at one another. There were perhaps sixty spectators. Marta had counted them on the way in, because a crowd is an instrument and you should always know how many strings it has.

She stepped forward and did not raise her sword.

"Sperzi," she said, pitching her voice to carry, "before we begin — how are you feeling?"

Sperzi frowned. "Fine."

"Good. Excellent. Truly." She let a beat pass, exactly one beat, the length of a heartbeat you have decided to make somebody else notice. "No dizziness?"

"No."

"Numbness in the fingers?"

"No."

"Metallic taste at the back of the tongue?"

Sperzi's frown deepened. He was not a stupid man. He was, however, a man who had been drinking in taverns for the last week, and in three of those taverns — the Broken Wheel, the Cat and Compass, and a cellar place near the tanneries with no name at all — he had heard, from three unconnected strangers, that the Bellini woman had studied under a Serro apothecary and that she had a habit of settling matters before the blades came out. Rumours are cheap. Three rumours, planted in the right places, cost Marta less than a decent dinner.

"What are you saying?" Sperzi demanded.

"I'm saying nothing at all," said Marta, with immense sincerity. "I'm asking after your health, as one professional to another. I always do. It's a courtesy."

She turned to Bosso and produced, from her coat, a folded paper with a green ribbon and a wax seal that had cost her four crowns and an afternoon of arguing with a seal-cutter about the exact eagle used by the College of Physicians in Ravella.

"Deputy Registrar, would you be so good as to hold this? It's a physician's letter. In the event of an unfortunate outcome today, I want the record to show I gave fair warning."

Bosso, who could not have said no to a determined goose, took the letter. Marta had written it herself, three nights ago, in a hand that trembled convincingly. It described a champion of large build presenting with an irregular pulse and advised that vigorous exertion in cold weather might prove fatal. It named no one. That was the beauty of it. It named no one at all, and Bosso, being a small official in a large coat, unfolded it and began to read.

Sixty spectators watched a deputy registrar's face change.

"Is that about me?" said Sperzi.

"It's a private medical matter," said Marta.

"Is it about me?"

"I'd never discuss another man's health in public."

Bosso, God bless the boy, said, "It says the exertion could be fatal," and the courtyard made the low rolling noise a crowd makes when it thinks it might see something.

Sperzi's face had gone the colour of old cheese. Two weeks ago he had woken at night with his heart banging like a shutter in a gale — most men do, at forty, after eleven cups — and he had told his wife about it, and his wife had told her sister, and Marta had bought the sister a very nice piece of fish. This is the trade. People think proxy work is about wrists. It is about fish.

"Shall we?" said Marta pleasantly, and drew.

They circled. Marta's blade was blunt, and her guard was, to any trained eye, an embarrassment — she held it as if she expected the sword to bite her. Sperzi noticed. Sperzi thought: she is nervous. Sperzi thought: she has poisoned me and she is nervous about the timing.

He attacked, badly, out of anxiety. Marta gave ground with a great deal of arm-waving and no technique whatsoever, and while she gave ground she took the small green bottle out of her sleeve and dropped it.

It shattered beautifully. Plum brandy has a very particular smell, sweet and hot, and it does not smell like poison at all, which is why Marta had spent two crowns having a Serro apothecary's label printed and pasted on the glass. Nobody in that courtyard had ever smelled Serro poison. Everybody in that courtyard was now certain they had.

"Oh," said Marta, in a voice of pure, bottomless dismay. "Oh, no."

Sperzi stopped.

"Don't breathe it," said Marta. She was backing away with both hands up, a woman appalled at her own carelessness. "Sperzi. Ottavio. Don't breathe."

"What was in that bottle?"

"Nothing. It's nothing. It's a tonic."

"WHAT WAS IN THE BOTTLE?"

"Ottavio, I want you to sit down, and I want you to sit down calmly, because your pulse—"

And there it was. The word pulse, dropped into a man who has spent a week being told he might die and thirty seconds smelling something sweet in the cold air. Sperzi felt his heart, because he had been invited to, and a heart under invitation always performs. It thundered. He went down on one knee in the frost, and his sword rang on the flagstones, and he said, in the voice of a very large child, "I have a daughter."

"I know you do," said Marta gently, kneeling opposite him, and she meant it, which was the worst part. "Renata. She's seven. I asked about her."

Sperzi began to cry.

"Surrender," she said, "and I'll send for the physician, and you'll be at your own table by supper."

"I surrender," wept Ottavio Sperzi, forty-one engagements, into his enormous hands.

Bosso, dazed, declared the grievance satisfied in favour of the Widow Antinori. The Widow Antinori shrieked with joy and threw her hot wine at the Baron of Coltre, which was not strictly within the Codex but which nobody was inclined to stop. The crowd roared. Somebody shouted Bellini! and then everybody did, because a crowd is an instrument and Marta had been playing this one for eleven years.

She bowed. Twice, because they wanted two.

Then she walked, at a measured and dignified pace, around the corner of the stable block, behind a hedge of dead lavender, where she gripped her knees and was thoroughly and comprehensively sick.

When she was done she sat down in the frost with her back against the wall, and shook, and waited for it to pass, which it always did, in eleven or twelve minutes.

Forty-seven engagements. Forty-seven victories. Not one swordfight.

Her father, Anselmo Bellini, had fought sixty-two. He had fought them properly, with skill and honour and beautiful footwork, and on a Tuesday in the autumn of Marta's fourteenth year he had fought a young Serro proxy who was faster, and on the Wednesday they buried him, and on the Thursday the Guild sent a clerk to the house to collect his dues.

Her mother had gone six years before that, of a fever. So it had been Marta, and the baby, and the debt.

Sitting in the frost, she gave herself the usual small lecture. Cowardice is a discipline. Anyone can be brave; it takes nothing but a bad afternoon. To be a coward for eleven straight years, professionally, and never once be caught at it — that is a career.

She wiped her mouth, straightened her coat, went back around the hedge, and collected her fee from the Widow Antinori's steward with a modest little speech about how she had hated to see a fellow professional so unwell.

Eight crowns. She had it counted out in her head before it hit her palm, and by the time she reached the road she had spent it four times.