The day I saw you dying was the day
I died myself
Venice
A few hours earlier
Alvise threw the bow and arrow on the mosaic floor. The sound echoed throughout the palace. Once again the Falco girl had run away. Once again she’d put them all in danger. Foolish, foolish girl. A child – fifteen years old, only three less than him, but still a child. Alvise cursed the moment his father decided to take the Falco children under his roof. Ranieri died quickly – poor soul, eaten alive by the Azasti. Tancredi had run away, in a delirium caused by his illness. And Micol was left, hating every day she spent with the Vendramin, convinced that they wished her ill, convinced that they were torturing their own little Lucrezia, Alvise’s sister. Completely delusional.
If only he still had his powers, or their Gamekeepers were still alive. But they’d all been killed, in ways Alvise didn’t want to remember.
He sat at the piano in anger and started hitting the keys. The music he played was full of sorrow and tension, and the face he saw was the face of a woman with long, nearly white hair, like his.
A dark-skinned woman with grey hair pinned back and a crucifix around her neck peeked through the door. Cosima.
“Signor Vendramin! Lucrezia is talking. Hurry!”
Alvise jumped up from the piano and ran down frescoed corridors towards Lucrezia’s room. Immediately his sister’s odd scent, a flowery fragrance so heavy it was nearly rotting, hit him like a wall. There were no flowers in her room that day. It was Lucrezia’s chemistry, her skin and breath that produced the strange scent.
Lucrezia lay still in her bed, her eyelids flickering, her hands abandoned by her sides. Hair so light it was nearly white fanned over her pillow, loose strands at her waist. She was whispering, a jumble of words and sounds that made no sense – but they knew that soon her gibberish would condense into a message.
Alvise sat on her bed and held her hand. Micol could read in his face the pain that Lucrezia’s terrible predicament brought to him. Forced into immobility, turned around like a doll to avoid bedsores, the endless, restless sleep and continuous dreaming. It was no life for his sister.
Alvise had spent many hours sitting by her bed, lulled by her murmuring. Occasionally he would stroke the loose hair away from her face or caress her hand. Whenever he touched her or spoke to her, Lucrezia’s babbling seemed to soften, until just her lips moved and no sounds came out. At times she took a deeper breath, as if his touch brought her some relief, as if she were aware that she wasn’t alone.
Sometimes silent tears rolled down her cheeks, and Alvise could feel his heart breaking. He sat there, eyes dry, wishing death would take his sister at last.
“You must go,” Lucrezia’s clear, young voice resounded in the high-ceilinged room. She had spoken in her native Italian, and not in the Ancient language. The cold light of dawn was seeping through the shutters, illuminating the girl’s pale face and lips. Alvise leaned towards her, waiting for her to explain. A torrent of murmurs followed, something about a silvery winter and an incandescent stone, mixed with sounds in the Ancient language and some in a language that was only her own. And then, more Italian words, enunciated clearly, slowly, as if something else had taken possession of her vocal cords and mouth and was painstakingly forcing muscle and tissue into the right shapes.
“They are coming. You must go.”
Alvise’s mind raced. A new message meant a new task. More demons to destroy. He knew his father should hear this. “Father,” he called, looking frantically at his sister. “Father!”
Within moments, Guglielmo Vendramin was at his side, sweeping into the room in traditional hunting garb.
“What is it?”
“Look at Lucrezia.”
Slowly, slowly, Lucrezia began to raise her right hand and her thin white arm.
“You must go, Alvise,” said his father.
“I know.”
They had to be quick. Lucrezia’s arm was rising, rising, revealing her palm. Burnt into her skin was a spiral, shining gold. A memory flashed before his eyes: his sister screaming as the spiral was carved into her hand under the eyes of the Sabha, and pure gold poured into the wound.
Between them the iris grew, gaining strength with every second.
“Good luck, my son,” he heard his father whisper. He always did that before a journey through the iris, like a blessing. Alvise accepted his father’s great bow and sling of arrows, then stepped toward his sister.
Already a golden ribbon was taking shape in the room, circling slowly to create an inward spiral. The scent of dying flowers was unbearable. Alvise stepped beside Lucrezia, lying immobile with her arm raised, a strange glow emanating from her palm. He took her hand so that their palms touched, and he felt a sudden pain – something that had never happened before. And then he stepped into the spiral.
He’d been through the iris many times and knew the sensations well, and still, this time there was something different, more intense, even violent. His body felt torn apart, fragmented into its molecules, whirling around like snowflakes in a storm, and then forced back together. It felt like all the bits of him were still unglued, kept together by some magnetic force, instead of bonding to each other, and the slightest force, the slightest shift in energy, would scatter them once again and he’d be no more.
Fear gripped his stomach and took his breath away, and for a moment he believed that Lucrezia had made a terrible mistake, that the iris wasn’t functioning the way it was supposed to, that it would kill him. He twirled in gold for what seemed like a long time, every fibre of his being fighting to get a grip of itself, of the molten gold that danced before his eyes. And then, all of a sudden, it was over.