The Nascenza Conspiracy (2 page)

He grunted as several pairs of hands grabbed at his vest and began to hoist him up. A pair of aspirants on the balcony below squinted into the sun as they stood with outstretched arms, ready to catch Petro should he fall, but obviously praying that they wouldn’t be tested. The group rescuing him managed to bang his head against the scale’s cornice, hard, and thoroughly to scrape his back raw on the stone as they hauled him up and over the rail, but in a matter of moments he was on his feet and more or less none the worse for wear.

Talia Settecordi immediately enveloped Petro in a mighty embrace. “I was so worried!” she exclaimed, resting her chin on his shoulder. “They shouldn’t do that to you! Don’t they know who you are?” She rocked him back and forth until it felt frankly uncomfortable.

Lately, rumor around the aspirant’s wing (also known as the lower insula) was that Talia and Petro were sweethearts. Petro suspected that the rumors had come from Talia herself, for he certainly had never shown any interest in the girl. Perhaps something was wrong with him, but none of the young women in his age group interested him that way yet.

“You’re of the Seven!” Talia crooned, still hugging him. “They’re only of the Thirty, and the Falos aren’t even of the upper Thirty. I mean, who are they, really? They make guitars.” She sniffed through her long, thin nose.

Adrio, who was two fingers shorter than Petro, peered up at the girl. “My family’s not of the upper Thirty, you know.” Thankfully, at that moment the aspirants managed to detach Talia from her stranglehold and steer Petro in the direction of the stairs.

“Trust me, I know,” Talia replied to Adrio.

Her comment might have caused Adrio to deflate, but the tanner’s son did not let the topic go. “No, but you’ve managed to say just now that only the upper Thirty matter. Just because you’re of the upper Thirty yourself doesn’t mean
…
”

“Don’t be a fool, Adrio,” Talia snapped. Petro sighed, and tried to shut out everyone’s noise. He hated all the fuss people made over him, everywhere he went. Without comment he let the two bicker as the senior aspirants dragged him downstairs.

Elder Catarre stood waiting at the bottom of the stairwell, her arms crossed. “Do we wish to talk about this issue, now that we have our feet firmly on the ground?” Adrio and Talia and the others retreated to a respectful distance.

“We don’t have much to say,” Petro said, with as much genuine respect as he could muster. “We—I was exploring a little, and tripped and fell.” He saw the elder’s shoulders tense up with a thousand reasonable retorts to his outlandish lie, and the last thing he wanted to do was rebut them. “Elder,” he interrupted, bowing in the proper manner with his hands folded. “I do beg your pardon, but I am expected
…
”

She raised a single eyebrow. “Who else is more important than me, at this moment?”

Petro bit his lip. “My sister, Elder,” he admitted.

“He’s needed at the palace,” breathed Talia.

“So I gathered, Signorina Settecordi,” said Elder Catarre, her voice level and dry. Although Petro had two other older sisters—Mira, a master glass maker for the insula at the Fero outpost, and Vesta, who resided at the Insula of the Children of Muro—the only Divetri who truly mattered in most people’s minds was Risa. “As Brother Cappazo might say, I made that logical leap. But Cazarrino,” she said. Though she did not move so much as an finger’s width, to Petro it felt as if the elder suddenly loomed in upon him. “When you return from the palace, you and I will be having a discussion in my chambers. A very serious discussion.”

“Yes, Elder,” he murmured, bowing once again.

While the elder had been talking, the senior aspirants had been vanishing one by one from the stairwell. Adrio jerked slightly, obviously intending to follow, but Elder Catarre was too quick for him. “Cool your oxen, Ventimilla,” she ordered, grabbing him by the collar and returning him to place. Adrio muttered oaths to himself. “You will call upon me as well. Don’t keep your sister waiting, Cazarrino.”

“Yes, Elder,” he repeated. Bowing one last time, Petro sighed with relief and began to run across the outer courtyard as quickly as his sandaled feet could carry him.

He reached the egress from the courtyard and heard a voice behind him. “Oh, Petro,” it cooed in sticky, feminine tones, “be sure to come find me when you get back from the palace.” He turned to see Talia simpering beneath the main arch. “I want to hear everything.”

Petro winced. An evening spent having to endure Talia’s attentions? Perhaps he wasn’t getting off so lightly after all.

You have requested that I pinpoint the vulnerability of
Cassaforte’s king. This I can say whole-heartedly:
nothing weakens a man more than when he loves another.

—The spy, Gustophe Werner,
in a missive to the Emperor of Vereinigtelände

So are you taking Talia to the Midsummer revels?” Adrio had caught up with Petro at the insula gates. His legs were so much shorter than Petro’s, he gave the illusion of having to run twice as fast to keep up as the pair jogged along the canal walls toward the city’s center.

“No!” The annoyance in Petro’s response wasn’t at all feigned. “I don’t find her attractive at all.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Adrio said quickly. “What’s attractive about her?” He held onto his insula cap and puffed out his cheeks as the pair of them leapt over a narrow bridge to cross the royal canal, which did little to make him look older or taller. “Besides her fair skin, her beautiful face, her good manners
…
”

In his most sentimental voice, Petro added, “And her voice like the strings of a well-tuned lute, not to mention the way her hair gleams in the twin moonlight?” Provoked by the good-hearted jibe, Adrio shoved Petro as if to push him over the canal wall and into the muddy waters below. “If you like her so much, why not ask her yourself?” Petro asked.

“As if she’d look at me. You’re of the Seven. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“What does my family being of the Seven have to do with anything? The Seven and Thirty are households of craftsmen,” said Petro, shaking his head. “Countries like Pays d’Azur and Charlemance have nobility. Not Cassaforte.”

“Do you honestly think the nobility of Charlemance started out as damas and ritters? No! They were once pig farmers!” Adrio spoke so loudly that several of the merchants crowding the street craned their necks to look. “If I were of the Seven, I’d be plucking wenches for myself like oranges. If I were of the Seven, I’d be getting free drinks at the tavernas, just because I could. Baso Buonochio gets free wine and cakes whenever he goes down to Mina’s on the artist’s spit!”

“Baso Buonochio gets free wine because he was one of the heroes of the revolt against Prince Berto,” said Petro. Even after four years, his own sister still received abundant gifts of food for her own part in that affair. She sent them all to be shared among the impoverished boat people of the Temple Bridge. “If you were of the Seven, you’d be receiving letters from your parents reminding you to be humble and to say your daily prayers,” Petro said, speaking from experience. “You’d be reminded of your station in life almost constantly, and never have a chance to get your hands on any girls’ oranges. Honestly, Adrio. It’s not all cakes and wine.”

Adrio wasn’t convinced. “You’re wrong,” he said, circling around his friend and stopping his progress. “Care to make a wager?”

“I never take up any of your wagers,” said Petro, crossing his arms. “Not the bet about whether you could sneak out after the last horn to see Tania Rossi in that play on the Via Dioro
…
”

“I could have done it,” Adrio muttered. “Besides, you’d already seen her, because you’re important and all. You
met
her.”

“I especially didn’t take up that wager with the frogs and the insula buttery. Remember what happened?”

Adrio reddened a little, but he had already worked himself into a bluster and didn’t want to lose it. “All right, so you don’t wager. For your own good, though, promise me something. Let’s agree that when we’re let loose for Midsummer revels this year, you won’t keep your skull mask on the entire time. Promise you won’t skulk in the shadows like always. Let’s have some fun, like the popular youths, instead of being wallflowers. Take advantage of your position. Be the sevenest Seven anyone has ever seen!”

“I want us to have fun.” Petro pushed on in the direction of the palace. The Midsummer revels was one of the few holidays of the year when those in the aspirant’s wing were allowed into the city after the last horn of the rite of fealty, to visit the midnight festival in Temple Square. Aspirants could stay out all night if they wished it, though Petro had never been able to stay alert that long. “But if one word got back to my father that I had been puffed-up and arrogant, he would come up to the insula, grab the scruff of my neck, and throw me in the canals.”

Adrio shrugged as if that were nothing. “I’d fish you out.”

“By the way, I don’t skulk in the shadows. Or keep my mask on all night.” It was tradition, at the Midsummer festival, for celebrants to attend wearing skull-faced masks of some sort or another. The simplest were mere canvas sacks chalked out on one side, while those worn by the wealthy were often enameled and quite elaborate indeed. After tossing moon-shaped charms into the bonfires, very often the masks came off for the night. Petro had perhaps left his mask on more often than not, to avoid being noticed.

“You need to live!” Adrio tried to stop him once more, but Petro refused to be halted. He was already late to his appointment with Risa. “Putting up walls and hoping everything goes away is all very well when you’re a castle under siege,” Adrio continued. “You’re no castle, though.”

His friend’s choice of metaphor was apt, for Petro felt embattled from all sides. Especially at the moment. “I wish you’d stop.”

Adrio’s chattering did not cease, however. “Should I show you how to live like one of Cassaforte’s Seven? I propose this: come the Midsummer revels, you hide behind my cheap mask while I wear your costume and pretend to be you. Remember, it’s not as if anyone outside the insula knows what Petro Divetri really looks like. I wager that, when I’m you, I can cadge our fill of free roast lamb and as many pear pies as I can carry. Not to mention get any pretty girls we want.”

“But I don’t want to be you,” Petro replied.

Adrio’s tone shifted sharply. “Why? Because I’m not of the Seven, like the Divetris? I
am
of the Thirty, you big snob. Maybe of the lower Thirty, but the Thirty all the same.”

“The whole thing about there being a lower Thirty is a myth.” Petro wondered for a moment if anyone would notice if he pushed Adrio into the royal canal below. But they had reached the trade entrance to the palace, and the crimson-clad guard who’d quietly greeted them at the bridge would probably report something like that to Risa. A ranting Risa Divetri was the last thing Petro needed. “Talia Settecordi is the one who talks about the lower Thirty, not me,” he added. Then a thought struck him. “Is this about Talia? Really, are you sweet on her?”

“No.” Adrio’s response was hasty. Too hasty. But he said nothing else as another guard nodded and joined them at the entrance.

“Petro,” the guard said.

“Mafeo.” Petro grinned at the man who’d become a familiar face over the last four years. Then, in a quiet aside to Adrio, he growled, “Well, don’t be angry with me because of Talia. I’m not a snob.”

Though he was quieter in the guard’s presence, Adrio was no less insistent as he murmured in Petro’s ear. “You miss the point. Common people are
happy
to be good to the Seven, Petro. They
like
it. They’ll talk about how they met me—met you, that is—for months. If someone is upset with anything you do at the revels, which they won’t be, and your family hears about it … well, it wasn’t
really
you, was it?”

“You’re the one missing the point, and my answer is still no. Wait here and don’t get into any trouble.” Petro didn’t bother to look at Adrio’s reaction as he left him behind. He knew it would be sulky.

Inside, Mafeo followed Petro until they came to another post at the bottom of a stairwell, where he excused himself. Two more guards greeted Petro by name and gestured for him to follow them up a somewhat grim and functional set of stairs, lavishly hung with banners and tapestries, that led from the ground floor to the palace’s highest reaches in its northeast corner. Another two guards joined them at the top, marching Petro toward his destination. Approaching his sister’s quarters with a battalion of guards in attendance, and then leaving as they drifted away one by one, was a formality Petro was accustomed to by now.

The royal residence of the palace occupied most of those upper floors. It consisted not only of the suite occupied by the king himself, but of smaller accommodations allotted to those who had reason to live and conduct their business in the palace on a daily basis. The most essential servants, for example, occupied small apartments along the hallway where Petro now walked accompanied by four guards. The king’s bodyguard and her family occupied a suite within shouting distance of the king’s own. These days, after the death of King Alessandro, the chambers on the topmost floor, where the extended royal family had once lived, were mostly empty. It was at the open door of one of the few occupied chambers that his entourage left him.

“Wartface!” For the second time that day, Petro found his rib cage nearly crushed by an enormous hug. He yelped, for his back still smarted from having been raked across the stone. “What’s the matter?” Risa Divetri added, loosening her hold immediately though not letting go of her grip on his waist. “Don’t tell me you’ve grown too grand for affection from your sweetest and most devoted sister.”

“Oh, is Vesta here, then?” Petro looked around the room with mock innocence. Risa whuffed with outrage, but before she could swat him in a painful place, Petro gently disengaged himself. “Take care!” he warned, sitting down on a plain and practical sofa. Risa had stripped her own apartment to a bare minimum of furniture and work space; very little of the frills and adornment found in the rest of the palace remained. “I hurt myself.”

“Hurt yourself?” Risa immediately sat down next to him, folding her hands in her lap and tucking her feet beneath herself with quite a display of decorum. “Or were hurt?”

“Don’t,” he begged. “You don’t know what it’s like, in the insulas. You’re lucky you missed all that.”

Her eyes flashed with a show of dry humor. “I suppose I am.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know.” Sometimes it was difficult to remember how traumatizing it had been for his sister four years ago, when she alone of all the children of the Seven and Thirty had not been chosen for either the Insula of the Children of Muro or the Insula of the Penitents of Lena. Petro, on the other hand, had never wanted to leave Caza Divetri. He would have gladly swapped places with Risa on that disappointing day and spent the rest of his life keeping the glass furnaces of Caza Divetri hot with wood, or sweeping out scraps from the workshop floors. Unlike Risa, he hadn’t wanted his life to change.

Risa, however, had burned to start a new life at the insula, and had been sorely downcast when told she was not wanted there. Of course, now Petro was living the insula life that Risa had wanted but never achieved, while, at the gods’ hands, she had transformed into something wild and strange … a sorceress, struggling to master powers greater than any Cassaforte had seen for centuries.

“Then again,” Risa continued, her voice neutral, “perhaps if you weren’t such an annoying little crybaby mama’s boy, the bullies wouldn’t
…
” She shrieked and leapt to her feet when Petro feinted a lunge at her. His back ached too much to follow through.

“Twit,” he said.

“Lack-brain,” she countered.

“Duck nose.” He was pleased to see her jaw drop and her hand fly to the slight snub in the middle of her face, even if she was only pretending to be offended by the old jibe. “And here I thought you were too grand to have an ordinary little brother.”