Shadowheart (18 page)

“I am the son of my father. My chief object is no secret to you. The Imperial jewels are as dust to me in comparison.”

The Venetian nodded. “I do not quarrel with your ambition. The Riata are poor friends to Venice—they sit astride their mountain passes too greedily and try to cheat us of the silver we’ve contracted from the mines. But all men are subject to error in their judgment.” He paused. “There were rumors of some alarm in Monteverde in recent weeks.”

Il Corvo lifted Elaynes hand and bowed over it. He smiled down at her, his face strikingly handsome, under-lit as it was by the cool glow from the water’s reflections. “I can well believe that this fortune given to me has caused unease in certain quarters.”

“You are fortunate indeed to receive the favor of such a virtuous and illustrious maiden!” Morosini said, bowing also to Elayne. “But it was of more warlike motion that we had intimation.” He sighed regretfully. “I suppose that it is not so.”

“Rumors!” Il Corvo said with an apologetic opening of his hand. “How often they mislead. If the common knowledge whispers that I am poised to make war on Monteverde, you may be sure that is the unlikeliest of my intentions.”

The Venetian seemed thoughtful. Elayne did not think he entirely accepted the pirate’s vague account, but he did not press further on the subject. “Indeed,” Morosini said, “it would confound the gossips to hear that Il Corvo is upon a pilgrimage of devotion.”

“None would believe it,” Il Corvo said simply.

The old man chuckled. “Forgive me, I must confess to doubts myself.”

“I take no offense. For my lady, it is a pilgrimage of devotion. For myself, a pilgrimage in search of knowledge.”

“Commendable,” Morosini said. “What variety of knowledge do you seek in the Emperor’s chapel?”

“Nothing in his chapel, of course; I could hardly expect to enter there. But among the old Emperor’s collections—” He wriggled his fingers. “Charles was a fool for any holy relic. He would buy a tanned goat’s udder if he thought it was one of Mary Magdalene’s breasts.” He gave a bland smile. “So I was moved to sell one to him, having no use for it myself.”

The two men appeared to find this irreverence against God and Crown to be a fine jest. But Morosini managed to stifle his glee, offering an effusive expression of regret for offending Elayne’s goodness. The Raven only flicked her cheek carelessly and said no doubt his wife would make him a better man.

“A task of staggering proportions,” she said tartly.

Morosini had been about to speak—he closed his mouth and looked as if he had just seen her standing there. Elayne knew that in spite of his accomplished courtesies to a lady, until she spoke he had not given her personally any more thought than he would to a bedpost. She stared back at him in a manner that Cara would have certainly labeled as the behavior of a deplorable strumpet.

The Venetian’s brows drew together. She could almost see into his mind: he would not tolerate his own wife or daughters to speak so bold. At that look she felt her eternal impulsive willfulness take hold of her tongue. “Do you think I can accomplish it, Signor?” she asked mildly.

Il Corvo gave Elayne a shameless flash of heat beneath his lashes. With one of his wicked lazy smiles, he touched his shoulder. He smoothed his open palm over it as if he only brushed a wrinkle. “ ‘Tis certain no one else can,” he murmured.

Elayne felt herself grow crimson at this barefaced intimation. He had warned her sharply against any discourtesy, but he did not seem dismayed now at her impudence. Nay, he looked at her as if he would take her up against the wall where they stood—a thought that made the air seem so close and hard to breathe that she thought she might well smother of it. “If you do not make me far worse instead,” she replied, spreading her skirts in a mocking bow, looking down to hide her desperate flush. “My lord.”

“ ‘My lord pirate,’ you mean to say! But the goodness of your nature prevents you.”

The Venetian grew distressed, fluttering his hands. “Let us not speak too much in jest, I beg you!” He had recovered his civility. “Indeed, I have been remiss to keep her here, wearying her with our business trifles, when she ought to be entertained by my wife and her attendants. Do forgive an old fellow, Lady Elena.”

“I have not been wearied at all,” she said. “I find Il Corvo’s explanation of our affairs to be—amazing. What is it that we seek in the Emperor’s collections, besides a goat’s udder? I’m greatly agitated to discover.”

The Raven bowed to Morosini. “My wife is uncommonly learned for a woman. She delights in diverse knowledge.”

Morosini did not commend her for that. “I pray she does not become overly excited by such activity,” he said seriously.

Il Corvo took an impatient step, leaning his head against a window shutter and gazing out. Light from the narrow slats made bright lines across his face. “She’s made of stronger fiber.”

“Nay, but heed. The physicians are united in their advice on this topic! For a woman of advanced age, or a nun, it may do, but it is not healthy for a young maid of—of nubile years—to engage heavily in mental exercise.”

The pirate lifted an eyebrow, looking toward Elayne. He might have been smiling, but in the laddered strips of sunlight she could not be sure.

“We can only hope that my husband will reveal his object before my poor brain is overheated,” she said, with another courtesy.

“It is not your brain that concerns me, my dear,” Morosini said kindly, turning to her. “It is the diversion of life fluid from the womb. The ladies of the green-and-silver have often made this mistake, I fear, allowing mental exertion to weaken their bodies for breeding. Princess Melanthe herself spent her vigor in too great study, and bore only one sickly daughter, you must know. It was a great tragedy for Monteverde. You want to please your husband with a fine son, do you not?”

“Very true!” the pirate said, before Elayne could respond with a heated denial of Lady Melanthe’s inability to bear sons. He stood straight. “Madam, from this moment you are forbidden to read anything but recipes for lasagna.”

Morosini nodded. “Wise of you. It would not do to create too abrupt a change in her habits.”

The pirate smiled serenely at Elayne. “Certainly not. We will decrease her by degrees to instructions for sweetmeat,” he assured their host.

The old man’s face wrinkled into a deep smile. “Excellent. But we have kept her standing too long, I must insist. You have had enough exertion for this day, my lady.” He rang a bell, and in a few moments two young pages hurried into the room. “Inform the Signora that we have an honored guest. Quickly now! Quickly!”

Il Corvo’s business had not made her brain boil, but an hour in the company of Signora Morosini and her devout ladies was enough to make Elayne fit for a lunatic. The Signora in particular was liable to take offense at trifles, the pirate had warned her. He had cautioned her to take great care. Elayne knew she had already skimmed dangerously close to the behavior of a deplorable strumpet. So she sat in an upright chair next to Margaret’s stool in the dim, shuttered room, enduring the slow conversation. It seemed to consist entirely of ponderous commentary on the imperfect morals and lewdness of young women in these latter days, and the punishment that awaited them in the Inferno.

Margaret kept her face lowered. Elayne did not hide, but held her hands still in her lap, saying nothing, thinking of the Raven, thinking of the underground room, thinking thoughts so immoral that they were near beyond comprehension.

There had been no opportunity for confession since the night in his secret room, and no repeat of the act—in the stifling, close quarters of the magician’s galley, it was Zafer or Dario who kept watch over her as she slept, while the Raven seldom came into the cabin at all if she were there.

But the return to utter chastity between them had merely closed the door on a hidden furnace. Elayne labored in a state of sin that would have astounded the Signora. On the galley she had sat in the place prepared for her under a swaying canopy and pretended to occupy herself with gazing at the dolphins that escorted them. But when the Raven was not looking, she had watched him stand beside the deck rail, taking the motion of the ship easily, his hair tied back under a knotted sash. She thought of the sound he had made as he shuddered inside her; she felt his arms about her and the taste of his bruised skin on her tongue.

He kept a distance from her: a deliberate, taunting distance. Elayne affected not to notice him. She watched. She relived it again and again in her mind. And she knew that he was conscious of it, that he knew every moment where she was and what she was doing, as he knew the reach of his daggers. She held her breath and thought that when next he touched her in that way, she would shatter like a glass vessel into a hundred razor-edged shards of desire.

Signora Morosini lifted a pale hand, turning her beads to tell an Ave on her lady’s Psalter, then launched a measured discourse on the tortures to be meted out to unchaste whores who lured men into fornication and adultery for money. Concluding with a remark on the blessed sanctity of marriage, she nodded at Elayne with an air of compliment. A tiny motion caught Elayne’s eye. She glanced aside at her maid and saw that the girl was weeping without a sound.

Signora Morosini noticed it also. She looked at Margaret with a faint, satisfied smile. The girl’s quiet tears were a clear betrayal of her history, but instead of showing pity, the Signora resumed her sermon with renewed force, raising fresh specters of the agony in store for harlots. Finding a victim to address seemed to give her slow voice new energy.

When the Signora heavily advised Elayne that it was a peril to her own chastity to keep a servant who had sinned in such a way, Elayne came to the limits of her fortitude. She reached over and took Margaret’s hand, rising without a word. Without taking leave of the Signora or her ladies, without even a courtesy, she led Margaret from the chamber.

The pages leaped to open the doors and close them on the blocked silence that Elayne and Margaret left behind. The maid clutched Elayne’s hand. As soon as they were in the hall, she turned her face into Elayne’s shoulder and began to sob in earnest.

Zafer stood on the far side of the hall, his white turban gleaming in the dim light. He took an involuntary step forward, lifting his hand, then stopped. He looked up at Elayne, his dark eyes wide with question.

“They were cruel,” she said briefly, holding Margaret’s trembling shoulders. The girl turned her head, saw Zafer there, and put both her hands over her face. She shook her head violently and pulled away, hurrying to the farthest corner of the hall and turning her face to the wall. She huddled there as if she could hide from sight.

Zafer scowled. He held himself very straight as he bowed to Elayne, a little taller than she, but not as tall as his pirate lord. Then he waited.

“Il Corvo is still with Signor Morosini?” she asked.

“Aye, Your Grace,” Zafer said. “I can have a message carried to him if you wish.”

“Yes. You may tell him that I have offended the Signora past redemption and await his further instructions,” she said, with a light wave toward the closed doors behind her.

Elayne could not tell if he was displeased. He asked for no explanation, but she gave a stiff description of the Signora’s denunciations of corrupt young ladies anyway, daring him to say she should have borne it. But she kept her chin lifted and avoided his eyes as she spoke, gripping her hands in her lap.

“She is a scourge of prostitutes, is she?” was all he said. He leaned down and flipped Elayne’s veil over her face, then gave a quick a command to the pole-man of their gondola as they glided from the small river out into the teeming great canal, saying no more of their swift departure from the Case d’Morosini.

Elayne rearranged the folds of gauze so that she could see through the haze. She did not care for it; it obscured her vision and choked her breath in a way that she could not grow accustomed to, but she could comprehend that in Venice it was the proper attire for a modest woman. After the Signora’s spiteful lecture, she did not care to be taken for an immodest woman here. Even if she was one.

Margaret still sat huddled, her head lowered and her face thoroughly hidden. She said nothing. Zafer stood behind her, in the rear of the little silk pavilion, his legs spread apart, his knee touching the maid’s back with each rock of the slender vessel. Beyond the pirate, Dario also kept guard, his foot resting on the curved bow of the boat, his gaze sweeping over the passing quays.

Though she had known them but a few weeks, Elayne found an unlikely comfort in their little company. On the island she had thought it wicked of him to train up youths and children in his vile craft, but in the midst of this foreign city they seemed suddenly to form their own intimate band. None of them, Elayne knew, would scorn Margaret for her sins, and any one would spring to defend her safety with their life—as Margaret would do in return, if she could only manage to be quick enough with her poisoned cloak-pin. None of them would judge Elayne for the black desire she felt for their master, nor think it strange and sinful. They hardly knew what sin was, she thought. If he countenanced a thing, they would accept it.

Elayne greatly feared that she was learning to do the same.

“Come, I’ll give you a turn around the sights of La Serenissima,” Il Corvo said, as the gondola bumped gently ashore beside an imposing wooden drawbridge. A multitude of bells began to ring. Serene Venice was not so peaceful here: the gondolas vied for space at the quay and figures in long robes brushed past one another, men of light skin and dark, sloe-eyed faces of the east outnumbering the red beards of Europeans; a hundred different colors in the clothing and wildly diverse headdress. Many paused to pay toll and then disappeared onto the covered bridge, their footsteps creating a brisk rumble of sound on the wood, as if the bells urged them to greater haste.

Somewhere to the north and west, across the flat islands and the calm lagoon, lay the princedom of Monteverde. Ever the uneasy ally of Venice—source of the famed Venetian silver, guardian of the mountain passes; as Venice sent her northern trade through Monteverde, the ships of the green-and-silver sheltered in the lagoon and sailed in the company of Venetian galleys to Constantinople and the east. The hurried lessons in alliance and trade that Countess Melanthe had imparted to Elayne seemed more real now. As Monteverde itself began to seem more real, and more threatening, a storm just beyond sight, the sky darkening with menace on the horizon.