Falcon in the Glass (16 page)

The outer door to the glassworks stood wide open.

Renzo stopped before it. Peered inside.

Dark.

A wind gust picked up the hem of his cloak and flapped it against his legs. He shivered, suddenly afraid.

What combination of events, he wondered, would lead to this door standing wide and unattended in the middle of the night?

Nothing good — that was certain.

He moved into the doorway. “Hello?”

He listened for an answer, straining his ears against the dark. Behind him: water splashing against the sides of the
canal, and the hollow
thump
of one boat jostling another. Ahead: the dull, throbbing roar of the furnace.

It sounded wrong somehow. Not loud enough?

Renzo edged forward until he could see an opening in the furnace. Usually the fire was a dazzling white-gold, so bright, you had to squint to look into it. But now it had dimmed to a dullish copper.

Cold fire.

That should never happen. Never.

“Letta!” he called, and when there was no answer, “Taddeo!”

Quiet.

Renzo crept into the glassworks, alert for movement, for sounds. Something odd ahead — an overturned bench. And now he made out the shapes of tools, strewn about the floor, and feathers — far too many feathers. Something glittered ahead. A plume of glass shards, winking in the light of the furnace. Renzo scanned along the trail of broken glass until he found the pail, tipped over onto its side.

He crossed the wide interior floor, his lungs filling up with a thick, choking dread. He burst into the storage room.

The shutters stood open. A band of moonlight striped the floor and laddered across the tiers of shelves.

Empty. No one here.

But wait. There, in a dark corner, something . . .

An arrow?

Renzo moved forward. He stooped, grasped the wooden shaft. Its tip was embedded in something dark and small. Renzo took it into the moonlight.

It was a bird. A little wading bird with long, red legs.

Paolo's bird.

◆      ◆      ◆

T
he old woman cleared her throat. “He will abandon us,” she said.

But Letta did not look up from her writing. The woman watched the pen scratch across the strip of parchment, leaving a trail of tiny script. She squatted on the stone floor in the corner beside Letta. This far from the lamp, the message was no more legible to her old eyes than a line of sugar ants. “You know he will,” she said. “They all do.”

“What of
Nonno
?” Letta said, still not looking up. “He didn't.”

Matteo? She would compare this boy to Matteo?

“So there's no other like him in all the world?” Letta persisted. “Only one, and he fell in love with you?”

The woman sat perfectly still. What's this? she thought. What has happened between them? What have they done? “Letta . . .”

“Don't!” Letta looked up at her, eyes sharp but hurting. And young. Though not so very much younger than she herself had been when Matteo . . . Those days in the hills
above Verona . . . Not two words in common they'd had, and yet . . .

Someone called out in sleep — Sofia. Earlier she had had a nightmare. The woman listened as Sofia muttered something unintelligible, then settled back into silence.

She brushed her memories away. She must attend to
now
. To her youngest grandchild, to her grandnieces and grandnephew, to the children more distantly related. Who had been caught, arrested, terrorized, knocked about and bruised . . . Who had been bound, gagged, hooded, separated from their birds, dragged through the marsh, shipped across the lagoon . . . Who had been flung, sobbing, into this dank, foul-smelling hellhole to await whatever fate the Ten had in store.

The one mercy was that they had put all the children in here with her.

Letta's pen had begun to move again. “ 'Tisn't like you and
Nonno
,” she said. Though the woman hadn't asked. “He doesn't even know that I . . .”

Love him? the woman wondered.

“. . . think of him at all. But I believe he's . . . honorable.”

Honorable? Perhaps. Honor was not yet entirely dead in this world, however often it seemed so. But it was a concept the woman seldom dwelled on anymore. Survival, that came first.

She leaned back against the cold wall, watching Letta write.

Back in the early days with Matteo, there had been time
for falling in love, time for building a snug cottage in the hills, time for having many children.

But then the plague had come, with the mob on its heels, crying witchcraft.

How could they have thought that
we
had brought the plague, the woman wondered, when it had taken so many of our own?

But it was the birds, she knew. Her people's bond with them. This bond was too alien for outsiders to countenance for long; it was mysterious even to those who possessed it. Their green eyes might have been tolerated, but their birds — only for a while. Nevertheless, the bond was immutable; it was precious. It was part of who they were, no less than the hair on their heads, the noses on their faces, the lines on the palms of their hands.

It had been decided that the old woman should take the children to Venice, while the children's parents — those still alive — should seek far and wide for a place more hospitable to strangers. At first the scattered groups had sent messages back and forth, but after a while the messages had ceased. The old woman had sent her owl to find them, but he always returned with the selfsame messages she had sent.

Somewhere to her left Paolo moaned. The woman stood, feeling the familiar creaking rasp in her knees and hips. She picked her way through the welter of sleeping children until she came to Paolo. She sat again and took him onto her lap. His breath was easy. The smell of the marsh still clung to him, though it was fading, overcome by the sour reek of
sickness and piss and sweat. He had ceased with the vomiting at last, the vomiting that went on and on until she'd thought he must be hollow, just breath and bones. To lose your bird that way, so young. To see it slain . . .

Miraculously, the other birds had survived. The woman had found each one by kenning; she had overridden the children's kens and told the birds to wait hidden on the roof with her owl until after dark. She felt them now, pressing against her thoughts:
quick, tremulous, twitchy, hungry, eager, fretful
.

She kenned them to be still, be calm.

She wondered how long the jailers would keep her and the children here together.

She wondered how long the littlest ones could survive.

She wondered if they would hang her as a witch, and if the children would share her fate.

Letta blew on the ink, rolled up the strip of parchment.

Don't pin your hopes on this,
the woman wanted to say.
He will be loyal to his own people, and there is honor in that. Us he will have to abandon.

Letta turned to her, scanned her face. The woman did not smile or make her countenance go blank to hide her doubt.

Letta pursed her lips. “I'll send it,” she said. “We'll see.”

I
t had gone cold, the bird. Renzo cupped it in one hand — its spindly red legs limp between his fingers — half-hoping to feel the beating of a tiny heart.

But no.

It was still.

He felt along the shaft where the arrow entered the little body. It penetrated deep, too deep to leave space for life. He stroked the bird's speckled neck and back, as he had seen Paolo do. So smooth and silky. He had never actually touched a wild bird before. He set it down carefully, though he knew nothing could hurt it now.

He scooted a crate beneath the window, stepped up, peered out into the dark. Nothing moved. But a little way down the alley, a familiar shape . . . He scrambled over the casement, thumped down onto the packed dirt outside. Just a few steps, and he held it in his hands.

A boot.

A tiny fur-lined boot.

Sofia's boot.

Something cracked apart deep within him. His knees buckled; he knelt there on the ground, hugging the boot to his chest.

Letta . . .

What had happened to her — to them?

Was it a gang of witch-hunters? The constabulary? A band of thieves?

An assassin?

He rubbed his cheek against the soft fur at the top of the boot, then rose slowly to his feet and looked about. To the east, low on the horizon, the sky gleamed pearly gray. Morning would come soon. Though the alley was dark, he could see a churning of footprints in the dirt leading away from the glassworks; he could see feathers.

He jogged a few steps down the alley, then stopped, seized with indecision.

But by now they must be long gone. Long enough for the furnace to have cooled. And even if he did find them, what could he do? Fight off the constables, or a gang of thieves? No use, either, to go for help. Who would come to the rescue of a band of homeless, foreign children, deemed by many to be witches?

On the other hand he'd never heard of an assassin going after a band of children. And Taddeo . . . surely no one would see him as a threat. Whoever had taken the children would probably banish them, that was all. And the children had been banished before. They knew how to be banished.

Warmer days were coming. Letta was canny and fearless; she'd keep them safe.

Meanwhile, in the glassworks . . .

The overturned benches, the scattered trail of broken glass, the tools strewn across the floor. The feathers. The droppings.

An image of Sergio blinked into his mind. Twirling the feather. Showing it to the
padrone
.

The
padrone
began work every day not long after dawn. He would be here soon. If he saw signs of many birds, he'd likely give credit to Sergio's accusations. And then, for Renzo, there'd be no more of spinning and shaping the hot glass. No more stemmed goblets, footed bowls. His days in the glassworks would be over.

He made for the window, chucked the boot inside. He jumped up, climbed over the casement, dropped into the storeroom. Then he set to work. He swept the floor, seeking out every feather, every dropping, every shard of broken glass — scouring the glassworks of every trace that the children had ever been there, every trace that they had ever lived. He fed stick after stick of wood into the furnace, stoking the flames until they were roaring, until sweat rolled down his forehead, down his back.

Memories of Letta kept rising before him. Leading the children across the floor to the furnace, brooking no resistance from
him
. Thrusting the blowpipe at him, refusing to let him give up. Tracing the embroidered roses on Mama's mantle.

Where was she now?

At last, reluctantly, he threw the little boot into the furnace; it vanished in a burst of flame and a whiff of burning leather. He knew he should destroy the wading bird as well — but it didn't seem right that it should be bound together in death with the instrument that had slain it. He cradled the bird in one hand — soft, gray-brown, speckled — and carefully worked the arrowhead from its breast. He flung the arrow into the furnace first and watched the fire consume it. He brought the bird up near his face, breathing in the dusty smell of feathers, remembering how it had perched on Paolo's shoulder and pecked at the top of his head. A heaviness settled on his heart; for a moment it was hard to breathe.

He tossed the bird lightly, gave it to the flames.

Above him now light sifted in through the glass roof panels. He walked to the main door and peered out.

The sky glowed pink, the color of the inside of a polished shell. A soft breeze blew in from the west, bringing the smells of salt and tar and fish. Pink tipped the choppy gray wakes of the boats that plied the canal. The fishermen had long been up and gone, but the water teemed with boats — boats bringing in grain and spices, bricks and sand, kegs of wine.