The North
Gives us refuge
Micol lay on her bed, alone in her room in the heart of Palazzo Vendramin. Nothing unusual there, she did that a lot. There wasn’t much else to do, given she wasn’t allowed out and her wandering around the palace wasn’t exactly welcomed by the million servants the Vendramin Family seemed to have.
She studied the frescoed ceiling: a blue sky with gentle, white, fluffy clouds and fat baby angels sitting on them. The place looked like a museum. The whole of Venice looked like a museum. Before long, her thoughts began to wander to her brothers, when they had first come to the palazzo, and the months that followed.
They’d arrived by boat, in the middle of the night. Micol had been enchanted by the lights on the water and the web of canals they had had to negotiate to get to the palace. In spite of their desperate situation, she had been speechless with the beauty of the city they’d taken refuge in.
But then dawn rose, and she could see the decay in the buildings, and smell the foulness of the water, and feel in her bones how everything was rotting, how everything was falling to pieces. She decided she hated Venice. “The most beautiful place in the world,” Vendramin had said around the breakfast table, and her brothers had agreed – because they had to be polite, Micol guessed.
She had wanted to be back home so badly. The Tuscan countryside, with its sun-baked hills and the scent of greenery, and not a black canal in sight. She had sat at the huge antique table with a piece of bread and jam in her hands, not wanting to put it down in case Tancredi fretted she wasn’t eating, but unable to bite into it. She couldn’t cry, of course, though she had wanted to.
Just at that moment, Ranieri had started raving about how the whole city was beautiful now but one day it would be filled with oil and lit up by fire-breathing rats. The onset of his delirium was always sudden, unexpected. The first time it happened was in church. Afterwards, their mother had cried. Micol saw that her mother knew what the episode meant, that the Azasti had begun in her eldest son’s blood, and there was no way to stop it.
His crises were short-lived, but horrible. It was so strange to see her sensible, wise, strong brother shout nonsense, and in the worst moments, scream and cry and rip his hair out. Of all the scary symptoms he was suffering – the blue nails, the copious bleeding from every little cut, the weight loss that had wasted his muscles and turned him into a shadow of himself – the madness was the worst. It felt like her brother was vanishing, leaving a stranger in his place.
Tancredi had begun coaxing Ranieri towards his room. As they stepped out of the dining room, Vendramin said a servant would knock on their door later with something to calm him down. Micol had gasped silently. What were they going to give him? Some evil medicine? Maybe that was why Lucrezia was that way, the silent girl she’d only caught a glimpse of when they had arrived the night before. She had lay on her bed, pale and immobile, her lips moving in quiet, indiscernible whispers. They’d been told Lucrezia was ill, but was it her family who’d made her that way, or something else? They knew little about the Vendramins, after all. They had been brought together by the culling of the heirs, but they had never met before. And although the Vendramins had come to their rescue, Micol didn’t trust them.
Left alone at the breakfast table, she had looked around from beneath her eyelashes. Alvise, Lucrezia’s older brother, sat across from her. He seemed quiet, and his face was unreadable. He looked like he carried a heavy burden. But then, what Secret heir didn’t these days? Ranieri and Tancredi seemed to like him, or at least they spoke about him with respect. But, Micol thought, maybe it was because they had nowhere else to go, and nobody else to ask for help but the Vendramins.
Micol could still smell her family’s burning house. She could still see the flames dancing out of the windows as they ran. She remembered the soil demons grabbing her ankles, and Tancredi cutting their white, muddy hands off with his sharp claws – and the demon slaves, the dogs with human faces, hounding them all the way to the hideout her family kept at the edge of the lake. They remained there for a day and a night, listening to the growling and scratching outside, until the Vendramins’ Gamekeepers came to help. It was a miracle they had escaped.
“You must eat something, Micol,” the housekeeper said, kindly enough. But her stomach was in a knot, Ranieri’s delirious screams coming from upstairs upsetting her.
The palazzo was huge, but the acoustics were strange. You could hear almost everything from anywhere in the house. Micol wondered if it had been built like that on purpose, to enhance security. She already knew that the Vendramins were paranoid. Apparently, there were traps all around the palazzo. They were meant to keep the Surari out, but Micol suspected they also fit another purpose: to keep her brothers and her in.
“Sorry, I’m not hungry,” she responded, pushing her plate away and standing. “I’m going to my room.” She wanted to be alone.
As she sat on the sumptuous bed, the tears she’d kept inside finally fell. She buried her head in the fine silk of her dress – she had brought nothing with her, obviously, and was given Lucrezia’s clothes to wear. No jeans and T-shirts in sight, nothing normal, just long dresses that seemed to have sprouted from an evil fairy tale.
Micol cried for a long time, her shame in acting weak and vulnerable overcome by grief and fear. She hadn’t even had time to cry for her parents properly, she thought as a fresh bout of sobs broke her. They were barely cold in their graves when everything else had been destroyed.
Suddenly, there was a soft knock at the door. “Sorellina? It’s me,” a voice said. It was Tancredi.
“Come in,” Micol replied, in a tone that she hoped was steady enough. Tancredi had enough on his mind without worrying for her too. She had to be strong. She dried her tears the best she could, leaving dark patches on the sleeves of her dress.
“Hey, you’ve been crying . . .”
“No. I haven’t. I just washed my face,” she said lamely.
Tancredi sat on the bed beside her and wrapped her in his arms. She snuggled in, and to her dismay, tears started flowing down her cheeks again.
Ranieri was the strong one, the one they all relied on. He was brave and generous, but a bit distant, a bit more like a father than a brother. Tancredi, instead, was her best friend. There were over ten years between them, but they were so close that the age difference didn’t matter. The love she felt for him squeezed her heart. Ranieri was so sick; now it was just Tancredi and her, like two castaways in the middle of a hostile ocean.
“It’s okay, sorellina. You’ll see. We’ll be fine. We’ll find help for Ranieri and go home soon. I promise.”
Micol didn’t believe him.
In the weeks that followed, Micol remembered now, still staring at the ceiling, Tancredi had started hiding his hands from her. He’d even taken to wearing riding gloves whenever he could. But it was no use. Micol had seen his blue nails, and knew that the Azasti would come to take her second brother too.