The Glass Maker's Daughter

by V. Briceland

  What else could a window be used for? What other purposes did it have? To see through. To admit sunlight. To admit fresh air!

  A sense of triumph filled her as she reached out to touch the metal frame. She calmed her mind, once again summoning forth the image of the flame-streaked marble. Like a Buonochio painting, her mind filled with a vivid image of the windows opening to admit a breeze that smelled of flowers and spice and canal waters. Empowered by what she imagined, she lay hold of the handles and turned.

  They refused to budge.

  “It’s not fair!” Risa stormed, angry that it had not worked. On the ground below, Camilla was racing across the square followed by two new figures—Ricard in his gaudiest array and Tania wearing her full dancing skirts. All of her friends, there to help her. Her heart beat faster at the realization.

  “Very little is fair, my dear,” said Ferrer, with what Risa felt was an excess of practicality. For a man full of his caza’s accumulated wisdom, he certainly knew how to make her feel crabby.

  “Everyone else receives years of training in the insulas to learn enchantment, and I am expected to do it all in one morning!” The masks of Lena and Muro outside the window leered at her, seeming to mock her aspirations.

  On the ground, Amo and Mattio finished a consultation with the guards and began running east. They were going to the other side of the palace, she realized. Milo remained behind, but would he stay for long if he could not find her? The prospect made her ill. Ferrer’s stern drone only irritated her all the more. “Most of the Seven and Thirty have spent their lives behind insula walls studying tirelessly to hone their crafts. I suspect they would find it most unfair that their enchantments are substantially less remarkable than the two you performed in the space of less than two hours. Try not to try so hard,” he suggested. “I suspect—” Baso leaned forward and put his face in his hands, distracting the old man from the rest of his speech.

  His rebuke failed to comfort her. Milo was walking back and forth in the square, once coming to a stop directly below the window against which she fruitlessly battered. Risa leaned her head against it. Try not to try so hard! She wanted to dismiss the advice, but she suspected Ferrer was right. The enchantment with the spoon had seemed effortless in its spinning, as if she had created a direct match between her goal and the manner in which she wished to achieve it. Trying to open the window for fresh air seemed like a cheat, almost. She had no need for fresh air—if anything, the room in all its splendor was almost too chilly.

  “I wish I didn’t have any of this responsibility! I just wish things were back to the way they always were!” Risa was almost embarrassed at the fury with which she spoke.

  Ferrer’s tone was gentle. “My dear, the first thing we wish for, in extraordinary circumstances, is our ordinary lives.” It was the simplest thing he had said all afternoon. “We want the things we always want. It’s simple human nature.”

  But what did she want? She looked at the window. What did she truly need? To call to Milo, to capture his attention. She might never see him again, if she could not open the panes and call to him before he walked away—just as years ago, her mother had called to her father from an upstairs window.

  As she stroked the window’s cold frame, Risa felt the metal thrum with energy. Absently running her hands over the marble sill, she once more noticed Lena’s carved face, smiling at her from the column above.

  It was so simple. Ferrer was right. She had been trying too hard. Her neck and face tingled as she realized that all she wanted was the same thing her mother, twenty-nine summers before, had wanted—to open a window to call to a boy in the streets below. To smile at him and attract his attention, and to keep that attention for the rest of her life.

  She reached for the latches and pulled them inward, feeling energy surge through her fingers as the panels parted. Fresh air billowed over the sill, followed by the sounds of the square far below. Risa leaned forward, her hair tumbling down around her face. “Milo!” she shouted. In her heart she knew she called to the one boy she did not want to walk away from her. Not now, and not ever. “Milo!”

  For a moment she feared he did not hear her. Sudden and sharp was her relief, however, when he looked up and his eyes met hers. His face lit up with the grin she had treasured over the last four days. She felt herself returning it gladly.

  He raised a finger to his lips, warning her not to shout out again, then murmured something to his sister. Camilla too looked up and spied Risa, on the fourth and highest level of the palace. Milo was quickly informing Tania and Ricard of her whereabouts; when Ricard raised an arm to point, Milo hastily pulled it down.

  Tania took a quick glance up, then leapt into the air. For a moment it seemed as if she was merely excited to see her, but when the girl pranced away with leaps and bounds, in the direction of King Orsino’s memorial, Risa realized that Tania was dancing. From her waist she unfastened a tambour that she began to tap over her head in a lively beat; her skirts twirled as she began whirling in a swift tempo. Ricard strolled after her, moving his lute so that it no longer hung on his back but in a position to be strummed. Though she could not hear his music over the noise of the city below, Risa saw other people beginning to clap along to the poet’s lively song.

  For a moment she felt disappointed. Betrayed, even. She had supposed her friends had come to aid her escape. Instead, just as they had within hours after she had blown the Divetri horn for the first time, they were merely trying to earn coins.

  She watched Milo turn his head to follow their progress. When Ricard and Tania reached the shadow of the statue, which was lengthening across the bricks as the afternoon progressed, he gestured to Camilla. Then, although he began to stride off to the west and the palace’s rear, Milo stopped short and held up a flat hand with its palm facing her. Was it a goodbye? No—he was telling her to stop and to wait. Patience, she knew he would have instructed her. She nodded, and watched as the musical siblings scampered in the direction of the Royal Canal.

  She was scarcely aware of how elated the silent encounter had made her until she drifted back across the room and sat down, still smiling. Although her stomach still felt knotted from the morning’s events, for the first time in hours she felt optimism that the cazas might survive another night’s test.

  “That’s three miracles you’ve performed this morning,” Ferrer commented as he peered at her through his dual-lensed spectacles. “How many others shall we expect?”

  “They’re not miracles,” she said, uncomfortable at the word. “It’s just something that … something that needed to be done.” It was the best way she could explain it. “Cazarro, when you work your enchantments, do you feel anything?” Baso, his hands over his face, appeared to be following the conversation although he said nothing.

  “Feel anything?” Ferrer repeated. “In notes preserved by Cassamagi, Allyria wrote of the energies produced by objects when they are put to use, which she claimed could be altered and. … my child, do you sense these energies?” When Risa nodded, his shoulders collapsed and he let out a mighty sigh. “What I would give to know how they feel! Allyria wrote that the energies between linked objects, such as the Olive Crown and the caza horns, can extend for many score of miles.”

  “Like a rope?” Risa asked, suddenly excited. “It feels to me as if the horns cast a rope in the direction of the palace as they complete the rite. Do you feel that too?”

  Ferrer shook his head, astounded. “For how long have you sensed these things? You’ve never told anyone?”

  She mirrored his headshake. “Ever since I was a child.”

  “The gods truly did not lie,” he murmured. “You were never needed at the insulas. If anything, the insulas have needed you.”

  What a strange sensation, to be the tool of the gods. It was more frightening than any of the dangers she had encountered that week. Why was she so different?
How would people treat her, if they knew? Realizing she was longing for earlier days, Risa reminded herself of what Ferrer had said—that she was merely wishing for ordinariness in the midst of extraordinary tumult.

  But would she ever be ordinary again? The thought troubled her. Then again, if she was the hands of Muro and Lena, could there be hope that the gods might aid her in her quest to keep the city from a dark future?

  From outside the window, the pound of drumbeats grew louder. Risa rose from the sofa and walked back to the open window. The crowd below had grown. Ricard still played, at the center of a circle surrounded by perhaps a hundred lookers-on, but he had been joined by a number of lutists and jongleurs and drummers. A harpist—surely not the same harpist she had seen at Mina’s?—sat plucking her strings near the edge of the impromptu stage. Tania had been joined by a number of taverna dancers, and they all shouted lustily as they leapt and twirled their skirts to the drum’s rhythms. More and more people straggled from the market and from the palace to watch the jugglers and the flame-swallowers and the sword dancers who were entertaining the crowds.

  When she saw a number of crimson-clad guards lope as a group in the direction of the revelry, casting looks of guilt over their shoulders, sudden realization shook her. Ricard and Tania had not begun this festival of music and dance for the sake of earning luni—her friends were creating a distraction! The pretty girls and handsome musicians were sure to lure a number of the palace guards away from their posts, allowing Milo and Camilla a chance to work their way in. Their mother had been King Alessandro’s own bodyguard—they had practically been raised in the palace, Milo had told her. Of all the people she knew, they would be best able to find her.

  She looked out and up, to the left and right, where Muro and Lena’s faces gazed down upon her and upon the ground below. Did they smile at her, or laugh? She could only pray that they wanted her to succeed.

  31

  —

  You speak of our charges as if they were sheep, or at best, docile lambs led to shearing. My friend, these are the future leaders of Cassaforte that we educate. Innovation may not come easily to them, but by the gods, do they know how to fight for what is right.

  —Gina Catarre, Elder of the Insula of the Penitents of Lena, in response to a letter from Arnoldo Piratimare,

  Elder of the Insula of the Children of Muro

  As the sun fell farther in the sky, its light slanted into the parlor. The reflected rays glanced off the mirrors and highly polished surfaces, creating a great deal of heat and brilliance, but none of the captives rose to close the window or draw the curtains. They would have been left with silence, then, and missed the pulse of the roundelays and jigs in the square below. It was very difficult merely to sit there, however, so for a while they busied themselves by helping Baso clean his face and hands. Then Risa guided him several times around the square of settees. He seemed weak on his feet, but grateful to be mobile.

  Well over an hour and the greater part of another had passed by the mantel clock when they heard a scratch from the hallway. Risa immediately ran over and lifted the tapestry covering the massive oak door, her heart pounding as if it was a trapped animal trying to escape its cage. Ferrer also ventured over, leaning on his cane. Risa held up a hand to silence him.

  The noise sounded again, from the crack between the door’s bottom and the floor. She leapt back when the point of a blade suddenly protruded underneath, then retreated. The crack was too narrow to admit any more of the sword. She lowered herself to her knees and, keeping her face well away from the chink beneath the door, whispered, “Milo?”

  The scrabbling with the sword tip ceased. She felt the tiniest whisper of air from the hallway against her cheek as someone on the other side lowered to the floor. “Risa!” Milo’s fingers probed under the wooden door.

  When she touched his fingertips with her own, her heart pounded madly. This morning they had been a city apart. Two hours before she had only been able to look at him from four stories up. Now they were mere inches away from each other. “Is it safe to talk?”

  She could not hear his entire response, for it sounded as if he had turned his head at the beginning of his sentence. “ … Have to be quick,” she heard him say. “This is one of the doors … enchantment on it, I think.”

  “I know!” She found herself pronouncing every word more distinctly.

  “We’re going to try to break it down,” she heard him say.

  From behind her, Ferrer uttered an interjection. “My dear … ”

  “No!” Risa cried, ignoring him in her haste to stop Milo. “Breaking it in will make too much noise. Let me think of a way to remove the enchantment!”

  “Cazarra,” said Ferrer.

  “That’s impossible.” Milo sounded as if he was holding his lips against the crack. “Just stand away from the door.”

  “Risa!” She turned, startled that Ferrer had pronounced her name so sharply. “Child! The Portello enchantment only applies to our side of the door. All your friend need do is to turn the handle and push.”

  “Oh.” The simplicity of the solution caused her to blush. She repeated Ferrer’s instructions beneath the door, then stood back to watch the handle tentatively twist toward the ground. The door eased inward, bringing with it a rush of air. Milo and Camilla stood just beyond, swords at the ready.

  No amount of fresh air could compare to the relief that washed over her entire body at the sight of them. At first, Milo seemed surprised to see other people in the room with her. Then, recognizing the cazarro of Cassamagi, he gave him a respectful nod and sheathed his sword. For a moment he studied the prone form of Baso, and then turned again to Risa, seeming to drink in the sight of her. She felt she could bask forever in his gaze.

  Yet she knew she could not. “We have to hurry,” she told him, forcing herself to think of the dangers at hand. “How did you get rid of our guards?”

  His smile grew more amused. “I convinced them we’d been sent by their captain to give them an hour’s relief so they could go to the little festival outside,” he explained. “They looked glad for the break.”

  “Very clever, young man.” Ferrer had come up to stand beside her as Milo spoke.

  Even beneath his tan, Milo flushed slightly at the praise. “Mostly it was Camilla’s idea.” He gestured at his sister, who inclined her head in modesty. She too seemed glad at the sight of Risa, but kept casting glances back in the direction of the long hallway. “She’s the better strategist.” Ferrer bowed in Camilla’s direction, while Risa continued to stare at Milo. The fact that he was matching her grin for grin made her feel oddly giddy.

  Camilla respectfully returned Ferrer’s bow, recognizing his authority. With her hands, she mapped out their route while talking in a low and urgent voice. “We’ve gondolas at the lowest trade gate on the west canal.” She led them into the hallway and pointed in the direction of escape. “Luckily our route is the shortest possible—down the stairs in the southwest turret and a short walk to the water gate. We’ve seen to it that any guards we might encounter were told to take a break at our little festival. I think we can have all of you back to your cazas by well before sundown, Cazarro.” She sounded as if she was giving a report to Tolio, her captain.

  “What about the cazarri?” asked Risa. Even as she had yearned for her own release, thoughts of her parents had never been far from her mind.

  “Do you know where they are?” Milo gestured at the long hallway, upon which dozens of doors opened. It was one of scores of similar hallways in the palace, Risa knew, and one of hundreds of similar doors.

  She shook her head. “You’ve probably not enough gondolas to rescue them all, anyway.” Her heart sunk a little lower as she said the words. When Milo nodded in agreement, she made a decision. “I understand. Really, I do.” It was still difficult to let go of her fantasy of a glorious rescue, but the afternoon
was drawing to a close. They could not afford to waste time, or risk being caught, by searching for her parents.

  Milo leaned in close. “We’ll get them out soon. I give you my word.” She nodded, believing him.

  “This one must be returned to Buonochio. He is unsteady on his feet,” Ferrer said, gesturing to Baso. His eyes, however, regarded Risa with sympathy.

  “I am fine, sir,” said Baso in a weak voice, struggling to rise. He stumbled slightly as he tried to gain his balance.

  Camilla rushed to his side, draping one of his arms over her shoulder as she took a firm hold around his middle. She walked him out into the hallway as he protested mildly. “He can lean on me. Milo, you—”

  Whatever she had intended to say was interrupted by the harsh grinding sound of a sword being drawn from its scabbard. They all turned at the clamor. Risa’s pulse quickened when she saw a broad-shouldered guard running toward them, fire in his eyes and his mouth twisted into a scowl so savage she froze, unable to run. It seemed as if he was coming right at her, ready to slice off her head with a blade honed to a razor-fine edge, and all she could do was stand there.

  A blur of crimson ran past her—it was Milo, throwing himself with abandon down the hallway. She heard the hiss of metal as he once more unsheathed his sword; an answering cry came from Camilla’s own weapon as she tumbled after him. The pair of them stopped several arm-spans down the broad corridor, waiting for their foe.

  Spit flew from the older guard’s mouth. His foul oath echoed in the corridor. From his left side he withdrew a short dagger, so that he held a blade in each hand. Fully twice Milo’s age and size he stood, hulking over the Sorrantos like a mountain looms over hills.

  There was a silent, breathless pause as the three regarded each other. Though it lasted no longer than it took to draw in and expel a single breath of air, to Risa it felt as if time had slowed to a trickle. That one second seemed to last an eternity.