Page 2 of Blood and Moonlight

“Perrete Charpentier.”

A daughter of one of the fourteen builders killed in the accident, about my age. Nothing good comes of her visits, but the architect feels responsible for her father’s death, and so he’s tried to make sure she had enough to live on. Lately, however, it’s been obvious she earns plenty—doing exactly what Magister Thomas had wanted to prevent—and sees him only as a source of free money.

“Tell her to come back tomorrow,” he says.

The housekeeper shakes her head. “She says if you don’t talk to her now, she’ll go straight to the high altum.”

It’s easy to picture the stance Perrete took as she made her threat, hand on a hip jutted out, scarlet lips pouting, her face rouged to play up the natural beauty mark on her cheek. No doubt she waited until the midnight bells so she could actually carry out that threat and approach Altum Gervese as he walks back to his palatial home from the Sanctum after prayers.

“I’ll be fine without you, Magister,” I tell him. “I’d already planned on going alone.”

He shakes his head, though I can tell he’s torn. “Maybe wecould block off the area first thing in the morning and inspect it then.”

“You know it can’t wait,” I say. “The altum is already frustrated by our recent weather delays. He’ll be angry if we halt work tomorrow.”

Angry is an understatement. He’s been out to replace Magister Thomas for over two years, and his incessant, underhanded campaign from the pulpit is finally turning some people against him. As a result, donations have decreased, slowing our progress and seeming to back up the altum’s claim that it’s time for a new master architect to take charge.

Which was why I spent the entire morning showing the city provost and his sons around the expansion site. Fortunately, the Comte de Montcuir was impressed and promised a hefty contribution. I took him straight to the window maker, who then sketched his face as an inspiration for one of the stained glass pictures he’ll create. Nothing opens a man’s purse wider than public evidence of his generosity.

The master architect considers my argument for several seconds. At last he sighs. “Very well. I’ll speak with her, Mistress, in private. Let her in.”

Relieved, I open the door to the street. “I’ll be back before the rain starts.”

“Catrin,” calls the architect. “You’re forgetting something.”

I stifle a groan as I stop in the doorway. “Magister Thomas, I have never fallen.”

“Until last summer, the bell tower had never been hit by lightning,” he says sternly. The western facade tower, the shortest of the Sanctum’s four by a few feet, had been damaged by the severe strike. “Never only means ‘not yet.’”

With a heavy sigh, I take the coiled safety rope from its hook next to his cloak by the door. I’m about to walk out with it inmy hand, but I catch the architect’s glare and pause long enough to knot one end around my waist. “Better?”

His beard shifts with the skeptical tilt of his lips. “Will you use it?”

“Yes, Magister,” I assure him, though it will probably be in the way more than anything.

“Be careful,” he says, waving for me to go. “Mother Agnes would come at me with her bare hands if anything happened to you.”

I grin as I sling the rope over my shoulder. Despite the fact that the prioress of Solis Abbey just celebrated her seventieth birthday, I’m not sure it’s a fight she’d lose.

Perrete sweeps into the workroom then, wearing the simpering, one-sided smile that hides the rotten gap in her teeth. A wave of perfume from her dress wafts over me, and I grimace as I pull the door shut. Last time she was here, it took a whole day of airing to get that lingering scent out of the workroom.

From the street, I can see enough sky ahead of the approaching storm clouds to assure me I’ll have time for my inspection, but I still have to hurry. I turn and trot uphill toward the Sanctum, the wind at my back.