“You were at her coronation. Did you think it nothing but a vivid dream?”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.” Gallo leaned closer, pitching his voice low. “Is she really the pope? Is she anointed by the Gardener, like her father was? Is she the right one to lead us?”
Amadeo couldn’t answer right away. He hated that he couldn’t. He took a long drink from his tankard, almond-tinged suds fizzing on his tongue, and thought it over.
“The best we can do is have faith,” he said. “We know that Carlo is fallen. He ordered the massacre in Lerautia, and he let the Alms District burn. He’s no servant of the Church. Not our Church. But…now we have Livia.”
“As soon as they placed that hat on her head, the first thing she did was start an inquisition. Her father never did that, Amadeo. Never. I saw a boy cut down on the cathedral floor. The king’s own wife was taken—”
“On his orders,” Amadeo said.
Gallo fell silent.
“On the king’s orders,” Amadeo said. “And if you breathe a word of that to another living soul, you’ll be taking your life into your own hands. The evening of her coronation, Rhys gave Livia an ultimatum. If she hadn’t the order, he would have had her…removed.”
Gallo didn’t answer at first. He furrowed his thick brows, frowning, deep in thought.
“His own wife?”
Amadeo nodded, his lips pursed into a bloodless line.
“That was the price for our shiny new Itrescan Church. That was the price for Livia’s throne.”
Gallo stared down at his tankard. “Was it worth it?”
“Livia,” Amadeo said, “is pious. She is righteous. And she is perhaps the best choice among us to shepherd the Church through this crisis.”
“And yet I hear an unspoken reservation,” Gallo replied.
“She is also…determined. The sort of determination that can become ruthlessness. I’ve been seeing more and more of that side of her lately, and it concerns me. It would be all too easy for her to harden her heart and forget why she fought for that throne in the first place. Then again, maybe that’s exactly the quality we need at the helm right now. Time will tell.”
Gallo raised his tankard. “Time will tell.”
“You’ve a melancholy about you tonight. Is it just Livia that’s bothering you?”
He shook his head. “No. It’s the burden of bad news. My comments about the weather weren’t idle, Amadeo. I’m leaving.”
Amadeo’s grip tightened on the tankard’s handle. The hard iron edges bit into his fingers. “Leaving?”
“Retiring,” Gallo said. “There’s no place for me here, not anymore.”
“You were the master of the papal guard under Benignus, a post you earned and bled for. Why wouldn’t you do the same under Livia?”
Gallo spread his hands and gave him a gloomy smile. “What guard? Most of my men died on the night of the massacre, and the others have drifted off. As for Livia, she has her personal guard.”
“The Browncloaks? Gallo, you’re a veteran soldier, practically a knight. The Browncloaks are…”
Amadeo’s voice trailed off as he tried to find the right word. Gallo offered one up right away.
“Fanatics?”
Amadeo nodded slowly. “They…do carry a small amount of religious zeal in their hearts, yes.”
“Amadeo, always with a kind word for the undeserving. It’s not zeal for the Gardener, or for the Mother Church, and you know it. It’s zeal for her. Have you heard what people are saying in the streets? There’s a rumor spreading that Livia is some sort of…reincarnated saint. This following that’s building around her—it’s not normal. It has a dangerous air to it. You feel it, don’t you?”
“All the more reason for you to stay,” Amadeo said, sidestepping the question. “Stay and do what you can to shape things for the better.”
Gallo waved over a serving girl and ordered another round. He waited until she’d scurried back to the bar before he answered.
“I’m past my prime, old friend. I can command and lead, but fight? My reflexes are slowing. I pull muscles doing exercises I performed with ease a decade ago. No, I’ve got no business with a sword in my hand. I’d love to pretend otherwise, but when your job is protecting people’s lives, that kind of make-believe is fatal.”
“There are other jobs you can do—”
“No.” Gallo reached across the table and put his hand over Amadeo’s. “There are other jobs you can do. The Mother Church still needs you. You’re a man of the mind and the spirit, and yours are still sharp. I’m just a man of muscle. And I know when it’s time to take my graceful bow.”
“Where will you go?” Amadeo asked him.
“Maybe Carcanna. Warm, good sea air, white sand beaches. A good place for an old soldier to write down his memories before they grow too faded. History is being made all around us, Amadeo. Someday, someone might want to read my little piece of it.”
Amadeo swallowed, his throat suddenly dry.
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
“I’ll miss you too.” Gallo squeezed his hand. “But let’s save the tears for tomorrow, when my bags are packed. I have a much better way to spend this fine—if frigid—Itrescan evening.”
“And that is?”
The serving girl brought around a tray, slapping a fresh tankard down in front of each of them. Gallo hoisted his high, grinning as ivory foam sloshed over one side and spattered the rough-hewn table.
“The two of us,” he said, “get blind stinking drunk together, one last time. C’mon, Father, let’s see if you’ve still got stamina where it really counts. What do you say?”
Amadeo smiled at Gallo, despite himself.
“I say,” he replied, hefting his own tankard, “let’s drink to your health.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Must I?” Livia asked the next morning, draped in her silken dressing gown and staring dourly into a gilt-edged mirror.
Behind her, in the glass, Dante Uccello stroked a sculpted coal-black patch of fuzz on his chin. He’d spent weeks disguised as a native Itrescan, shaving his goatee and rubbing rust-red pigment into his wavy hair. Apparently, Livia thought, that particular bit of subterfuge is over.
She wondered what new one would take its place.
“It’s important for the people to see their new pope,” he replied.
“By parading me through the streets like a show pony?”
“It’s a procession,” he said, “and Amadeo tells me your father did this regularly. It’s especially important right now, as we work to build your following. Most of Istresca—most of this city, for that matter—hasn’t even heard about the order of inquisition. Those who have, though, may be fearful. And fear is not an emotion we wish to engender in your audience.”
He opened her chamber door. Cifrydd waited outside, a woven basket looped over one of her freckled arms. Two hooded Browncloaks loomed over the young woman, shooting glares at her that could cut glass. Cifrydd ignored them. She strode in, all business, setting her basket down and laying out an assortment of jars and vials, brushes and tiny pots.
“Make her glow,” Dante instructed her.
Cifrydd’s reply never varied. She stared at Livia’s face, like a sculptor eyeing a block of virgin marble, and gave a curt nod.
“I can work with this,” she said.
Livia kept her fussing to a minimum, resigned to enduring Cifrydd’s fastidious attentions. As a horsehair brush whisked over her cheekbones, Dante studied her in the reflection.
“Have you spoken to King Jernigan?” he asked.
“Since the coronation?” Livia’s eyes narrowed. “No. I did as he commanded. If he has something more to say to me, he can come and request an audience like anybody else.”
“Don’t undervalue his support, Livia. He’s very important to our cause.”
You mean your cause, she thought, but she left it unspoken. Dante needed Rhys’s help to wrest control of his home city. He
needed Rhys, for that matter, more than he needed her. Her job was to legitimize Dante’s rule when he took Mirenze by force. Rhys’s job was to provide the military strength to make that rule stand.
He had something more to say, she could tell, but he let the silence hang like a lead weight as Cifrydd saw to Livia’s cosmetics and pinned up her hair. It was only once the young woman left, the chamber door swinging closed at her back, that he spoke again.
“There was something else. A…small commotion, but one you should be aware of.”
Livia stared at herself in the mirror. Primped and painted, her image was alien. Only her eyes seemed real, like she’d been fitted with a perfect mask of her own face.
“A commotion?” she asked, trying to keep her voice neutral. She knew what he was going to say.
“Queen Eirwen. She never made it to the dungeons. Someone…attacked her escorts and took her.”
“Attacked?”
“Murdered,” he said.
She could feel him standing behind her, watching her in the glass. Studying the mask of her face, the same way she was, but searching for something different underneath. She kept her gaze steady, fixed on her reflection, fighting off any show of emotion that could give her away.
“House Argall, perhaps,” she said. “Someone must have forewarned them.”
Dante paced behind her, hands clasped at his back.
“Perhaps, but if that was so, why did no one warn the delegates who attended your coronation?”
Livia raised her chin. “I’m sure I can’t imagine. Such machinations are your domain, Signore Uccello. My job is to sit quietly and look pretty.”
He stopped pacing. “Is that the impression I’ve given you? That I think so poorly of you?”
“Can you not imagine,” Livia asked, “how I might have been led to that conclusion?”
“Livia.” He approached her, holding out a hand as if to touch her shoulder, but paused with his fingertips an inch away. “This is a partnership. And you are as quick and clever as any partner I could hope to have.”
She turned, rising from her chair to face him.
“Then let me in,” she said, the sudden ferocity in her voice pushing him back a step. “Do you think I don’t know you’ve been meeting with Rhys? Advancing your agenda, this grand ‘conquest’ of Mirenze? Yet you expect me to sit with my hands neatly folded and wait until you deign to tell me your plans! If you aim to take a city with Church sanction and troops in Church livery, Dante, you’d damned well better kiss the ring of the woman who owns the Church.”
He stood frozen, mouth agape. Livia blinked. She put the heel of her hand to her temple, wincing against a flare of white-hot pain that receded as swiftly as it struck.
“I’m…sorry,” she said, turning away from him. “I’m not feeling myself today. Headache coming on.”
“You’ve—” he paused. “You’ve been having a lot of those lately.”
“So I have.”
He wrung his hands together, fumbling for the right words.
“I’m not an open person,” he said slowly. “I was taught not to be. And I’m accustomed to rafting the waters of politics alone. But I’ve aggrieved you, and I regret that. I’ll try to include you more from now on. My word on it.”
She glanced toward him. “That’s all I ask.”
“Wonderful.” He dropped into a courtly bow and swung one open hand toward the chamber door. “Now then…shall we hold a procession?”
* * *
Dante was half right. The headaches had been growing in number. What Livia didn’t tell him was that they’d been getting worse as well. She could be perfectly fine, then suddenly reeling from an explosion behind her eyes, the pain as breathtaking as a fist smashing into her nose.
Sometimes the pain vanished in a heartbeat. Sometimes it lingered for hours. It all began the night she and her entourage were attacked in the queen’s gardens, set upon by fanged and eyeless monsters wielding nooses of black silk.
Livia had cast a spell. Not one from her forbidden book, the purloined journal hidden under her mattress in King Jernigan’s keep, but one that welled up from her heart and tore her world asunder in the space of one dire, alien word. Her Browncloaks, the band of refugees who had pledged themselves to her service, thought it was a miracle from the Gardener. A sign of Livia’s holiness.
She knew better. But what could she tell them?
Kailani, the self-appointed leader of her personal guard, waited for her in the hallway. The grizzled islander had a cheek raked with whitened scars and eyes hard as flint. The folds of her coarse brown burlap cloak slipped over the hilt of a stout, short blade.
“My Lady,” she said, falling into step with Livia and Dante. “Everything is prepared for your appearance. You’ll be surrounded by eight of your finest, and I’ve seeded another twelve Browncloaks amid the crowd, disguised, to watch for trouble.”
“How many of you are there now?” Dante asked.
She ignored him.
Past the great banded doors of the royal keep, out in the vast cobblestoned circle ringing a burbling iron fountain, Livia stood in the cold, crisp light of morning.
“It’s a parade,” she sighed as the bagpipes began to play.
A swirl of brown surrounded her, the Browncloaks forming a tight oval as she strode forward, just behind a twenty-piece band that shattered the morning stillness with an avalanche of sound. A brigade of Lychwold’s guardsmen carried the rear, marching in perfect unison, draped in green and black tabards with the Itrescan griffin emblazoned on their chests.
Shutters flew open along the frost-slicked street, heads poking out of windows like curious moles. Resigned, Livia raised one slender arm, waving to the gathering crowds. Along the way doors were flung open and people—some still in dressing gowns, some hastily tossing on the most formal rags they owned—came flooding out to follow along.
“Smile, Livia,” Dante murmured at her side. “It’s important to smile.”
Kailani, at her opposite shoulder, kept her gaze forward and her narrowed eyes alert. “Don’t tell her what to do,” she said.
Livia tried to smile. It was too much, though. Too much music—this close to the shrill bagpipes and clanging drums, the band was just a wall of noise that set her teeth on edge—and too many people, standing too close. And more by the minute, pressing in from every side. Her guard tried to give her a cushion of space, a few feet to breathe in, but the crowd felt like a garrote slowly constricting around her neck.
Teetering on the edge of panic, she kept waving, kept her chin high, a walking statue clinging desperately to grace. Hands pressed in between her protectors, reaching for her with grasping fingers, wanting to touch the embodiment of their hopes and dreams.
Stop it, she wanted to scream. I’m nobody special. I’m just a person like you. I’m just trying to help, that’s all. But she bit the inside of her bottom lip until she could taste blood, keeping her mouth still and her scream buried deep in the pit of her stomach.
Amid all the noise and chaos, she never saw the danger coming.
She heard it, though. The shrill cry of “Death to the false pope!” as an emaciated woman in a fishmonger’s apron drew a filleting knife and threw herself at Livia. It happened too fast for her to move—but not too fast for Kailani, who leaped into the assassin’s path.
The knife punched into Kailani’s breast, tearing through burlap and skin and bone on its way to her heart, then ripped free.
Panic hit the crowd like an explosion as Kailani tumbled into Livia’s arms, sending her staggering to her knees on the cobblestones. The street became a blurry wash of stampeding feet and confused shouts and the thud of the assassin’s body hitting the cobblestones a few feet away, another Browncloak’s dagger buried in her throat and washing the stones in blood. Livia cradled Kailani’s head in her lap. The woman’s eyes were glassy, distant, as her shoulders shook and she let out wet, choking sounds.
Livia tried pressing her palm to th
e wound, anything to stop the torrent of heart blood, but it guttered out between her fingers. Kailani squeezed her other hand, weak as a kitten, her lips moving soundlessly.
“Don’t try to talk,” Livia said. “It’s all right, Kailani, everything’s going to be all right.”
She knew she was lying, though.
Her gaze drifted to the assassin. Wheezing as the rent in her throat spilled the last drops of her life onto the cobblestones. Her blood pooled and mingled with Kailani’s, becoming one, and Livia clenched her jaw in outrage.
No, she thought, your deaths are not equal. You deserve to die. She doesn’t. It’s not fair. It’s not RIGHT.
Her palm grew hot. Hotter than the blood, like a brand pressed to burning coals. As her vision swam out of focus, she realized she could see the assassin’s breath. It licked the air like a mirage, blurring as it drifted away.
Time slowed. A rattling drumbeat sounded in her ears, timed to the hammer of her heart.
She’d saved Kailani’s life—all their lives—with a spell once already. Livia knew, instinctively, she could do it again.
But at what price?
Damn the price, she thought.
CHAPTER FOUR
The blood is the life. Livia knew this like an infant knows her mother’s face. She could see the life now, dancing motes of glimmering light trapped in the pool of mingled blood. A bridge between Kailani and her killer. A bridge that was dying by the second. Livia’s only chance.
“The blood is the life,” she snarled under her breath. “Give her yours. All of it.”
Her palm grew hot as a fireplace iron, burning into the wound as she tugged the golden motes through the air by force of will, by force of fury, driving them into Kailani’s open mouth and into her body. The power spun inside Livia’s skull, a wave of pressure like the walls of a tornado, building, becoming unbearable, and then—
—nothing.
Livia trembled, her skin clammy and bones feeling hollow, with her fallen guardian’s head resting in her lap.
The assassin was dead.
Livia pulled her hand away. Kailani’s wound was cauterized, the torn flesh seared black as coal in the shape of Livia’s handprint.
Terms of Surrender (The Revanche Cycle Book 3) Page 2
