Yes. She was definitely trouble. And yet . . .
Just the other day, on his rounds through the dungeon, he had peered through the bars in her door. He had seen them sleeping, the woman and her owl. She had sat slumped on the bench, leaning against the wall — head tipped back, mouth half-open, defenseless. Now that she wasn’t skewering him with those strange eyes of hers, she hadn’t seemed so much like a witch. Even in the faint glow of her lamp, Guido had seen how thin she was, how wrinkled, how frail. The owl, perched on her shoulder, had leaned into her neck, its ear tufts tickling her chin. It was downy, speckled, and tiny. You could hold it cupped in one hand if you wanted to.
Guido blinked, struck by a sudden thought. What would happen to the owl? When the woman . . .
“He won’t kill her owl, too, will he?” he asked Claudio.
Claudio shrugged gloomily. “Who knows?”
“But a little bird like that . . .” Guido swallowed.
Surely he would not!
◆ ◆ ◆
In his neat, orderly mind he sorted things into compartments. Family was separate from work was separate from wenching was separate from politics. A place for everything; everything in its place.
Which might be why, he reflected, rounding another bend in the dark corridor, he felt so oddly comfortable in dungeons — despite the clamminess and the moaning and the stench. So many problems here, but each stayed locked in its own separate cell. Things didn’t leak into other things. Didn’t overlap.
Outside, though, something had overlapped, and it disturbed him. One problem had bled into another unrelated problem, and he needed to know the source of it, needed to know why.
Early that morning, a while before dawn, he had observed the nephew of the missing defector at some distance from his home and the place where he worked. The assassin had followed the boy, hoping he might lead him to the defector, who had been sighted on the island. Instead the boy had met up with one of the bird children who had been chased out of San Marco.
Ordinarily the assassin would have had no interest in the bird children. The Ten had charged him to deal with the defector, that was all. He had dealt with them before — glassworkers who had left Murano, taking their secrets with them. Now he had been given this one particular assignment, and that was all he cared about. Keep it in the box. But the coincidence had pricked his interest. Two entirely separate problems had come together, and one of the two problems was his.
He had followed the nephew back to the glassworks. He had seen exactly eight children climbing out a back window — with their birds.
A puzzle indeed.
He had tracked the bird children to the marsh, but they had divided up, and the muck was oozing into his boots. . . .
Children were unreliable, in his experience, at providing accurate information. Even with the application of pain — though, some would disagree with him on that point. But he had neither desired nor needed to go tramping about in the marsh. He knew another way.
Now, just past the threshold to the women’s prisons, he peered through the bars of a door and found her. He set the torch in an empty cresset and rubbed his aching hands. Every year they grew more painful. He couldn’t keep this up forever.
He opened the leather purse that hung from his belt. Reached inside. Drew out the key.
Officially he was not allowed to have a key of his own. He was supposed to request one from a guard. But one does not always have time to argue with a guard when one requires a key. It was an open secret that those of his profession had their own master keys made; now he did not even bother to ask.
◆ ◆ ◆
The woman lay perfectly still until she heard the click of the lock behind her, heard the footfalls fade away down the hall. Cold wicked up through the stone floor and spread into her flesh, into her bones. She could feel that her owl wanted to return to the cell, but she kenned him to stay hidden.
She sat up slowly, painfully. She tipped her head back, pinched her nose to stop the bleeding. The echoing sounds of the dungeon drifted in, nothing out of the ordinary: somebody pacing, somebody babbling, somebody sobbing.
When at last the bleeding ceased, she clambered to her feet. Still shaking, she made her way to the bench and lowered herself, knees creaking, to sit. She leaned back against the stone wall and let out a great, deep sigh.
Everything hurt.
Time was, she could have been knocked to the floor a couple of times and felt only flesh pains. But now her bones pained her too, and all the sinews in between them, and all the organs underneath.
She spit into her hand, thinking to scrub the blood from her face. But her spit was bloody too.
Still, it could have been worse.
Much worse.
Gingerly she touched her nose, explored the shape of it. Likely not broken. He would know precisely how to break a nose, and had chosen not to.
He would know precisely how to snap a neck.
He hadn’t asked any of the questions she’d expected when she’d heard the footfalls cease before her door and had glimpsed him through the bars. Questions about spying and witchcraft. Questions about the birds. Questions about where the others were hiding, and where they planned to go next.
No. He’d asked only about a boy, a glassmaker’s drudge: How much did the children know about this boy? Why would a glassmaker’s drudge be willing to risk sheltering the children and their birds?
She had lied to the man, told him she’d never heard of the boy. Though, in truth, she knew little enough. Only what might be scrawled on a scrap of parchment small enough for a kestrel or a pygmy owl to carry.
He had not believed her. Not quite.
Though, for some reason, he did not yet want her dead.
She summoned her owl from wherever he had hidden himself. Soon he swooped between the bars. Alit on her shoulder. Pecked at a strand of her hair.
She stroked his back with a finger and gave him a comforting ken.
Then she rose from the bench and, with a popping of hip joints and knees, knelt to pull the loose stone from the wall. Some previous guest of the Ten had hollowed out a small hiding place behind the stone; the guards had not yet discovered it. She drew out the quill, the tiny ink pot, and the scraps of parchment. She had smuggled them inside in secret pockets sewn in her clothing — under the knot of her sash, inside the hem of her shift. It was good, though, that she’d found the loose stone. Otherwise the ink pot might have broken when she’d hit the floor. The assassin would surely have found it.
She dipped quill in ink and began to write.
16.
Miracles
You say you tripped, and fell against the crates?”
The padrone, rolling one of the glass knobs between his fingers, shook his head as if baffled. As if Renzo had told him that elves had come into the glassworks and destroyed the goblets. Which, Renzo reflected, wasn’t so far from the truth.
“On what, pray tell, did you trip?”
“I just . . . The tip of my boot caught, and . . .” Renzo could feel the lie burning its way up inside him, warming his face. He could feel the heat of the others’ gazes upon him — the two other masters, the assistants. He wanted to apologize again, but in the face of the loss of those magnificent goblets, his “I’m sorry” had sounded so feeble, it had almost been insulting. He wanted to say, “I’ll pay for them,” but that would be another lie. He couldn’t begin to pay.
The padrone peered down at Renzo’s boots, as if the answer to the mystery lay there. From near the furnace came muffled laughter and Sergio’s voice: “. . . tripped on air.” Renzo clenched his jaw. He watched the padrone’s face — cold and masked. Papà would have been shouting, waving his arms.
Taddeo plucked at the padrone’s sleeve. “I saw him do it!” he said. “It was Renzo — none other!”
The padrone jerked his arm away. “There’s nothing amiss with your boots,” he said. “Perhaps you were overweary? Or perhaps . . .” He squinted at Renzo, studyi
ng him.
Renzo shifted, uncomfortable. The padrone smelled the lie.
“But he did it!” Taddeo said. “No one else! I saw it with these very eyes.” He pointed to his eyes, as if their existence proved his point.
“The air got in his way,” Sergio said, and chuckled.
Something flashed behind the padrone’s eyes. He turned his gaze from Renzo and fastened it on Sergio. “You find this amusing, do you? The loss of an afternoon’s work?” His voice was neutral. Dangerous.
Sergio reddened. He shook his head.
“You’d best attend to your own work, which has been a disappointment to me. I wonder, Sergio, will you ever be padrone here? I do not know.”
The air shuddered, a silent thunderclap. Renzo couldn’t look at Sergio. The shame was too painful.
The padrone turned back to Renzo. Rolling the knob between his fingertips. Calculating.
Words rattled around in Renzo’s head; the lie burst out before he could stop it. “I’ll pay for them. No matter how long it takes. You can garnish my wages. I — ”
The padrone cut him off. “No. You cannot. You’re a drudge. I tolerate you here only out of pity for your mother, but now I’m done. One week. Take your test, and then . . .”
The padrone flung the glass knob hard into the broken-glass pail. He spun round, picked up his blowpipe, and headed for the furnace.
◆ ◆ ◆
One week. Seven days.
Impossible.
Barring a miracle, Renzo would humiliate himself so thoroughly and so publicly that he would never be allowed to work the glass again.
But he had to keep up the pretense. What else could he do?
Could he confess to Mama that he knew without a doubt that he would fail?
No. Not yet. He couldn’t.
He told no one.
He arose after midnight, he trudged through the dark streets to the glassworks, he took up the gather on the end of the blowpipe, he worked the glass. Exactly the same as before. Trying to hide the fact that he was a sleepwalker, a ghost. That he was halfway gone already.
Letta seemed softer after he’d found Paolo in the church. She wasn’t so quick to take offense, and her eyes, when she looked at him, seemed to have lost their mocking glint. Sometimes she even smiled. But this night, after a while, she began to question him. “You’ve made three like this already; whyn’t you move on t’ the next thing on your list?” Before long she began to nag: He should not take so long to rest, he should attend more closely to the work, he should rescue this cup or that bowl before it was hopelessly lost.
He let the blowpipe slip from his hands. It clattered on the stone floor, rolled a little way, and came to rest against the base of the padrone’s bench. “It’s no use,” he said.
Letta frowned at him. “What d’you mean, ‘no use’?”
“I mean, I can’t do this. I’ll never pass.”
“So you give up? Just like that?”
He slumped down onto the padrone’s bench, head in hands. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand you’re a coward.”
He snapped upright. “I’m not afraid! It’s — ”
“I know fear when I see it. And I know fear’s useless. Worse ’n useless.”
“Listen, Letta. I don’t have as long as I thought. I have one week.”
Letta blinked, seemed confused. “But . . .”
“The padrone. After the . . .” He flicked a glance toward the welter of sleeping children, and lowered his voice. “After the goblets. He changed the deadline for the test.”
“When were you going to tell me this?” she demanded.
He shrugged.
“And when the week’s done?”
“I fail the test. I’m forbidden from working the glass after hours. No one will take me as an apprentice. I’ll be a drudge for the rest of my life . . . if I’m lucky.”
“And what of us? What of them?” Letta stabbed an angry finger in the direction of the children.
Renzo picked out Paolo, curled up among the others. The wading bird had perched on one of his grimy, swaddled little feet. The bird ruffled its feathers, then folded up one long red leg beneath it and tucked its head beneath a wing. The crow turned its head to preen its feathers; a few of the children stirred.
“Taddeo will let you in,” Renzo said. “Long after I’m banished, you’ll all still be here, warm and cozy by the fire.”
Letta snorted. She picked up the blowpipe from the floor and held it out to him.
Renzo looked away.
“I’ve no respect for people who give up.” She thrust the blowpipe at him, reminding him of that first night, when she’d wielded it as a weapon.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “It’s impossible.”
She fixed him with a searing look. “I know people who’ve refused to give up in far worse straits ’n yours. There’s others counting on them, so they keep on trying. No matter what.”
It came to him, then, that the fate of these children rested on her shoulders, just as his family’s fate rested on his.
Out of the corner of one eye, Renzo caught a fluttering of wings. The children were waking, watching.
Letta stepped nearer, touched the end of the blowpipe to his chest. “Take it,” she said.
Her eyes — so intensely green — reached down into a deep place within him, and made everything go still.
“Take it,” she whispered.
And this time, reluctantly, he did.
◆ ◆ ◆
Over the next couple of days and nights, a strange thing began to happen. Renzo’s life, which had felt like an unending struggle, began to open up to moments of peace, moments when the ordinary events of his days seemed piercingly fragile and dear. He drank in the look of Mama working in the kitchen, her hands deep in flour. He drank in Pia’s lively stories about the events of her day. He drank in the glass, all the lovely ways of it. He tried to etch into memory the feel of the waves of heat on his arms and chest and face, the weight of the glass on the end of the blowpipe, the taste of iron on his lips.
He no longer strove to master the glass but only to know it, to play.
More often than before, his gaze strayed to the children and their birds. He drank in the sight of Paolo drowsing peacefully, still coughing a little but not much the worse for his night in the rain. He watched the sparrow and the finch flitting back and forth from one twin girl to the other — Marina, he reminded himself, and Ottavia. He listened to a conversation between Federigo and his marsh hawk, where they queck-eck-ecked back and forth at each other, seeming to share a joke. He saw the crow pushing its head against Georgio, begging to be stroked with a finger. He smiled at the magpie, who surveyed the world from its perch atop the littlest boy’s head, like a preposterous black-and-white hat.
This bond they shared, the children and their birds . . . it began to seem a bit miraculous. Renzo almost longed for a bird himself.
Once, as Sofia hitched a ride on Federigo’s leg, Renzo recalled a pair of tiny, fur-lined boots he’d seen in the alms sack. Pia’s boots — she had outgrown them. They might be a little large for Sofia, but she would grow too.
How easy it would have been to take those boots out of the sack and bring them here. And the moth-eaten leggings he had put into the sack, and maybe an old shirt or pair of breeches from Mama’s rag basket.
Why hadn’t he thought of that before?
Letta he watched as well. The way she pursed her lips in concentration as she affixed the bowl of a drinking cup to the pontello. The way she glanced over her shoulder at the children, her eyebrows pulled together in worry. The way she spoke to them — sternly at times, and yet never far from leaping into battle on their behalf.
Tentatively he began to ask her questions. Where had they come from? What had happened to their parents? How had they all come to have birds?
She told him little. They were not a family, or at least not family as Renzo und
erstood it. True, each one had those striking green eyes. But not all were related by blood and, with some who were, it was a distant kinship, as with members of a tribe. A few of their parents had died in a plague; she wouldn’t tell him what had become of the others. In any case, the children had come to Venice with Letta’s grandmother.
What had happened to her, Letta wouldn’t say. Nor would she tell him much about their bond with the birds. “It’s who we are,” she said. “Since time before memory. Nobody knows why, for true. It’s just” — she shrugged — “who we are.”
“But Sofia doesn’t have one.”
“She’s too young. When the time’s right, she’ll know.”
They had no one, no one at all. Letta wouldn’t tell where they spent their days, but Renzo thought it must be in the streets and in the marsh. Who would look after them after he failed the test? Once, Renzo had found them shivering outside, crouched beneath the locked shutters — and Taddeo fast asleep and drooling on the padrone’s bench.
No, they couldn’t stay forever. But maybe until the nights were not so cold.
Now he turned to watch Letta take a small gather from the furnace. She swiped a hand across her face, and the copper light of the furnace flickered across the high, broad planes of her cheekbones and the bowed curve of her lips. He’d never noticed them before. Distracted by her strange eyes and disheveled hair, he’d never seen that she was . . . quite pleasant to behold.
She looked up suddenly, caught him staring.
He quickly turned away.
As he was about to consign his next failure to the broken-glass pail, Letta set a hand on his arm. “Wait,” she said. “See that.” She pointed to the malformed globe at the end of the blowpipe.
Renzo frowned, examined it. “It looks sort of like a bird,” he said.
“Like a falcon. Like my kestrel.”
He eyed the kestrel, perched on Letta’s shoulder, then turned back to the glass.
Yes. He could see the resemblance — a blunt, squarish head set securely on an upright oval body. The hint of a wing and a tail.
“Could you make wings for it?” Letta asked.
Falcon in the Glass Page 8
