Chapter 27 #2
"Shut up, and let's just find this bee and not worry about my knights," Frederica said, and with a chuckle, Dario got back to work.
There were more books, a rolled-up map of Venice he had bought on a school trip and never unrolled, a stack of old notebooks, and a photograph of him and his brothers face-down in a cracked frame.
Between a dog-eared copy of The Odyssey and a Barcelona guidebook with the spine falling off sat a small ceramic figure no taller than his palm.
Roman soldier. Crested helmet. One sandalled foot planted on a bird.
There was the word HODIE on his flag, and at the base of the plinth, the name had been hand-lettered in chipped black paint. EXPEDITO.
Dario looked at it for a long moment. It was still sitting where he had left it at nineteen, tucked between two books on a shelf he hadn't opened in ten years.
He picked it up and realized it was heavier than it should have been. He hadn't noticed that as a kid.
Frederica leaned past his shoulder without asking. "These little plaster statues are usually hollow. They make great places to stash things that you are trying to smuggle across borders. Tore once came home with a collection of tiny Madonnas filled with uncut diamonds."
"I'm not even surprised by that story now that I've met your father," Dario replied.
She took the statue from him, turned it upside down, and pressed her thumbnail into the flat base. "This one has been filled with something…"
She scraped away a thin layer of material, held it up to the window light, and sniffed it. "Ah, beeswax. Seems fitting. Tore used a kind of builders' putty in his."
Dario produced his knife from his boot, and Frederica held the statue steady while he worked the blade around the sealed edge. The wax came away in small flakes, brown with age, falling onto the floor between them.
When the blade broke the last of it, Dario turned it over and tapped it against his palm. Something small and wrapped dropped into his hand.
"Eureka," Frederica said with a grin.
Dario unwrapped the old cloth in two careful layers. On his palm sat a golden bee, no bigger than the first joint of his thumb. It was a warm, amber-gold that made the late-afternoon sun look dim.
"It looks similar to the bee trinkets they found on Crete, so it's definitely Minoan in design," she said, studying it.
It felt strange, like a faint hum was coming from it that Dario wasn't sure he liked. "What did Serapis call it the last time he called?"
"The Thriae Bee," Frederica said, very quietly. "True sight."
"Yeah, that was it. Thriae Bee." His voice came out lower than he intended.
Frederica shook her head. "Your father hid the one thing that can strip Agrippa's illusions inside a saint's statue and let it live in a nineteen-year-old boy's bedroom. You have to admit it would be the last place Agrippa would ever think to look."
Dario turned his hand slightly. The bee caught the light again, the gold deepening.
"I really did always pray to Expedito when I got in trouble," he said, looking away from the bee and back at the little figure. "Every time it was serious. When Mama shot Leo, the siege, the jobs that went bad. I know it sounds dumb, but the saint really did help out."
"I don't think it's dumb at all," Frederica replied, her grin back.
"My father's favorite saint is San Expedito, too, but only because he is really Hermes, the god of thieves and sneaks about at night.
Tore has a Hermes statue in the garden in Rhodes.
He is the Trickster, messenger, the one who stands at crossroads and moves between worlds.
He gets the things done that the proper gods are too proud to do themselves. "
She paused and laughed softly. "When I was small, he would get me to light a candle at the base of the statue before a job.
He always said the god of thieves liked to see that you were paying attention before he helped you.
It's a good saint for you. It's also kind of perfect to hide the bee as well because the Thriae, who the bee is named after, were Hermes's oracles.
They were bee women who lived in a cave in Delphi and used to give out prophecies.
If they were hungry, they would give you false ones, so you always had to make sure you offered them food first. They saw through everyone's bullshit, just like that little bee is supposed to. "
"I think both of our fathers are sneaky bastards.
" Dario looked at her and laughed at their troublemaking, too clever parents.
Their shared patron saint, the god of things that needed doing now, in whatever form he chose to wear.
The golden bee between them, hidden across years in a joke that hadn't been a joke at all.
Niccolò had chosen San Expedito because the saint represented his own nod to the god of magic, and the origin of the bee, but most of all because it was a saint that suited his son.
The son who got into trouble and always needed urgent help, who would carry the thing that could save them all, precisely because it was a gift from his father and because everyone underestimated the charming 'spare' brother in the Colleoni family.
If Dario remembered his myths correctly, everyone always underestimated Hermes, too. He had stolen Apollo's cattle and then tricked the gods into giving him a place on Mount Olympus, despite being just another bastard of Zeus's.
"I suppose we should call Serapis and tell him the good news," Frederica said, breaking his train of thought. "It might make up for us losing the mirror."
Dario closed his fingers around the bee, very slowly, and let the hum settle in his bones. "I need a minute."
Frederica didn't argue. She crossed to the window and looked out at the courtyard below, giving him the minute in the same quiet way she had given him the hours on the study floor.
Dario thought about his father writing 'he will keep it' in a journal that no one was meant to read. He thought about Rodrigo's birthday trip, a morning walk to the Rialto, and a ceramic soldier tucked into a gift bag with a joke about troublemakers.
The bee in his closed hand was warm now, and he shut his eyes. I kept it, Papa. I didn't know what I was keeping, but you knew I would take care of it. Now, it's going to protect us all like you wanted it to.
Dario let out a long breath, and the ache in his chest eased. "Okay, now you can call Serapis."
Frederica turned from the window and reached for her phone in her back pocket.
As she dialed, Dario looked down at the small golden bee one more time before he tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket, as close to his chest as a thing could get without being a part of him.
He would get a little bag for it to hang around his neck later, along with the necklace he had found in a drawer of the desk.
He put the little figure in his other pocket. He would need all the help he could get to get through the fight with Agrippa, and he wasn't about to leave his saint behind again.