Chapter TWENTY-THREE #2
"I won't pretend I have anything useful to offer against a man like Marzio Loschi, beyond an old woman's prayers and substantially better coffee than this house deserves. But I can tell you this much, cara — this family has weathered worse than a single desperate man's threats,
across five generations, and it has always, eventually, found its way through. I don't see any reason this generation should prove the exception, not with the kind of stubbornness you and Aurelio have both shown these past weeks."
"I appreciate the confidence." I manage a small, tired smile. "I realize less certain than you sound, this particular morning."
"Confidence isn't certainty, cara. It's simply deciding to keep moving forward despite the absence of certainty."
Pina pats my hand once, brisk and warm, and rises to attend to whatever else the day's preparations require.
"Eat something. Whatever today brings, you'll need your strength for it, and so will the little one."
I eat, mostly to satisfy her rather than out of any real appetite, and spend the remaining hours before the vote in careful, deliberate work on the icon,
the familiar discipline doing what it's always done for me — giving fear somewhere useful to settle while the larger crisis plays out beyond my control.
The work itself has become, across these past weeks, something closer to meditation than simple labor, the slow, patient rhythm of brush and solvent a steadying counterweight to whatever chaos the rest of the household is currently weathering.
The vote, when it finally happens, runs considerably faster than the morning's tension suggested it might.
I watch from the gallery above the consulta dining room — a compromise Aurelio and I reached after considerable negotiation, close enough to witness, far enough that no long lens from outside the grounds could possibly reach me through the room's deep-set windows — as Tarcisio rises first among the
twelve, his old voice carrying clearly through the room below.
"I have served this throne for sixty years," he says, "under three different kings, watching each of them navigate this mountain's demands with varying degrees of wisdom. I will say plainly what I suspect several others in this room are thinking and reluctant to voice first:
a king who chooses truth over comfortable inheritance, who faces his own family's worst crime directly rather than burying it the way three generations before him chose to bury it,
who stood in front of armed men himself rather than let his wife face that danger alone — that is not a king whose legitimacy I find myself questioning any longer. If anything, this past week has proven exactly the opposite of what Marzio Loschi hoped it would prove."
Ignazio Bova speaks next, his rusty old voice carrying markedly more conviction than it managed during the initial presentation weeks ago.
"I'll add this. A man who tries to seize a king's pregnant wife by force, who escapes custody rather than face the consequence of his own actions, who sends photographed threats to a household rather than arguing his case openly — that man has already told this consulta everything it needs to know
about what kind of legitimacy he was actually offering us as an alternative. I vote to confirm Aurelio Bruzzano's throne, and I vote, further, that this consulta formally and permanently strip Marzio Loschi of any standing among the allied families of this mountain,
regardless of where he's currently hiding."
The vote that follows is not unanimous — I count, watching carefully from above, two men whose hands remain notably still during the show of support — but it carries overwhelmingly enough that the room's mood shifts almost immediately into something resembling relief,
Donato's face breaking into open, unguarded joy beside his brother, Costanzo's careful composure finally cracking into something warm.
Aurelio looks up to the gallery before the room fully disperses, finding my eyes across the distance, and I watch eleven years of careful, disciplined uncertainty finally settle, in this one moment, into something that looks, even from this distance, remarkably like peace.
He climbs the gallery stairs himself rather than waiting for me to descend, and pulls me into an embrace the moment he reaches the top, his mouth pressed to my hair, his whole body loose in a way I haven't felt from him before,
a man who has just set down a weight he's been carrying for considerably longer than the morning's threat alone accounts for.
"It's done," he murmurs. "Whatever else Marzio has planned, he no longer has the leverage of a contested throne to threaten me with. The consulta has spoken, plainly and decisively,
and I intend to make certain every allied family on this coast understands exactly how decisively before the week is finished."
"And the sniper's note? What does today's vote do for that particular threat?"
"Nothing, directly. But a man who's just lost his entire political leverage is a man with rather fewer reasons to keep fighting, and a good deal more reasons to simply disappear before this consulta decides his continued freedom is worth pursuing formally."
His arms tighten around me. "I won't pretend the danger's fully passed, Ortensia. But I watch that room today, we've taken away the thing he actually wanted most. Whatever's left is merely a wounded man's spite, and spite, eventually, runs out of patience for itself."
"I'm proud of you," I tell him, meaning it completely.
"Watching you stand in that room weeks ago, choosing truth over comfortable inheritance — I don't think I fully understood, until today, exactly how much courage that choice actually required, or how thoroughly it's already begun reshaping what this throne means to the people who serve it.
Your father would have recognized it too, I realize, even if he never found the courage to finish it himself."
He holds me a long moment longer, the gallery's quiet broken only by the muted celebration still continuing in the dining room below, and I let myself, for this one brief, fragile stretch of afternoon, plainly feel the deep relief of watching something difficult resolve in our favor.
I think of every hard conversation that brought us here — the corridor argument over the consulta timeline, the painful symmetry of last night's pregnancy revelation, the slow, patient work of two people learning, imperfectly,
how to actually trust each other under genuine pressure — and find myself believing, in this one unguarded hour, that whatever remains of Marzio's threat, we've already weathered the harder reckonings this house demanded of us.
I do not yet understand how briefly that peace is about to last.