Chapter TWO #2
She disappears through the east entrance below me, flanked but not touched, and I am left alone on the loggia with the bergamot groves going dark gold beneath the falling light and the small, cold, entirely unwelcome understanding that whatever debt my grandmother sent me to collect,
I am about to discover I owe a great deal more than I came to claim.
I think of the ledger, locked eleven years in my father's desk.
I think of Adelina's hands on my face the night of my coronation, her voice telling me some crowns are heavier than the men who wear them.
I think, too, of the breakfast table this morning, of the way she looked away first, and I understand — not fully, not yet, but enough to feel the floor shift slightly under a decade of certainty — that my grandmother has been managing this particular piece of family history for far longer than
this single afternoon, and that whatever she's been managing, it has just walked through my front door wearing a workshop apron stained gold at the hem.
Costanzo is still beside me, quiet now, the kind of quiet he reserves for moments when he's decided arguing with me would cost more than it would gain.
He's been my right hand since we were boys throwing stones into the Amendolea river together, since before either of us understood what it meant that one of us would someday wear a crown and the other would spend his life standing just behind it,
watching for the things the man wearing it couldn't see himself.
He sees something now. I can feel him seeing it, the same way I felt my grandmother's eyes on me at breakfast, and I brace myself for whatever observation he's about to make, a specific bluntness he's earned the right to use with me and no one else.
"You've never sent anyone to the east salon," he says instead, mild, almost conversational, which is somehow worse than if he'd simply said what we're both thinking. "Not once. Not for the Calvanese settlement, not for Loschi's cousin, not for anyone."
"There's a first time for everything."
"There is." He doesn't push further, which is its own kind of statement — Costanzo has never once in seventeen years of friendship let me get away with deflection this thin,
and the fact that he's letting me get away with it now tells me he's already drawn his own conclusion and decided it isn't his place, yet, to say it aloud.
"I'll have Pina bring food. She'll need something after a drive like that, whatever else she needs first."
"Thank you."
He studies me a moment longer, the late light catching the gray that's started at his temples too early, that specific steadiness of a man who buried a wife three years ago and has been quietly, steadily holding the rest of us together ever since,
his own grief folded small and put away somewhere he doesn't let anyone see.
"Whatever this is, Aurelio. Be careful with it. You're not a man who's had much practice being careful with the things he wants."
I don't answer that, because there isn't an answer that doesn't admit more than I'm prepared to admit, standing on a loggia in the last light of an ordinary afternoon that has, somewhere in the last hour, stopped being ordinary at all.
I think of the harvest blessing, three days from now, the ritual I'll preside over the way I've presided over it for eleven years, the bergamot groves blessed the same way they've been blessed since before the first Bruzzano claimed this mountain.
I think of how easily a story repeated long enough starts to feel like simple fact, and how rarely anyone — myself included, until this exact hour — bothers to ask where a story like that actually began.
I go down to the east salon myself, instead of sending for her the way protocol and every instinct of discipline I've spent a decade building would have me do.
The corridor between the loggia and the east wing runs past the long gallery where the family portraits hang — five generations of Bruzzano men, painted in increasingly formal dress as the family's fortunes climbed, my own face among them now, commissioned the year after my coronation,
a young man trying to look older than he was in a room full of ancestors trying to look more certain than they probably felt.
I have walked this corridor ten thousand times without once stopping to look at the paintings properly.
I stop now. I don't know why — some restlessness in my chest that wants an excuse to delay the thing I'm walking toward, or perhaps the opposite, some need to look at the men whose name I carry before I find out what, exactly, one of them did to earn the debt I've just collected.
My great-grandfather's portrait hangs third from the end, painted in the stiff, formal style of the 1950s, a man with my own jaw and a gaze that gives nothing away.
Beside him, a smaller painting I've passed without remarking on my entire life — the icon itself, or a copy of it, commissioned sometime in the last century to hang in the gallery as a kind of family relic-of-a-relic,
the Madonna's painted eyes following the corridor the same patient way the original's eyes followed the nave at Polsi the night they crowned me.
I have looked at that copy a thousand times and never once asked who painted it, or why, or what story the original was meant to prove.
I am asking now. Standing in a gallery of men who built a kingdom on a mountain and called the building of it inheritance rather than conquest, I notice, for the first time in eleven years of careful, disciplined rule,
uncertain whether the story I was crowned into is the same story that's actually true.
It is not a comfortable thought for a king to have, three minutes before he meets the one person in his house who might already know the difference.
I want, very badly, and for reasons I am not yet honest enough with myself to name, to be the one who tells her she's safe.
I am not yet honest enough with myself to admit that this is also, already, a lie.
[End of Part One — Prologue through Chapter Two]