Chapter Two
The church bells toll for the angel’s death.
I open my window to better listen to them.
Verrocchio’s attic is cold in the winter and sweltering in the summer, so no one wanted it.
After Niccolo disappeared, I claimed it as mine.
I relish the frigid air on my face and try my hardest to crush the twinge of dread I haven’t been able to smother since the angel attacked.
Six priests came, four for the angel’s body, two to interrogate Master Verrocchio, because it’s a capital offense to harm one of the holy beings.
The priests looked unhappy with Verrocchio, even after all of us had assured them he had only done it to protect us.
I was unhappy too, but I kept it to myself.
It’s not my fault the angel attacked Giorgio, but the way the other apprentices refused to make eye contact with me afterward made me feel like it was.
I shiver. Not wanting to brood any longer, I latch the window shut and leave.
Verrocchio’s house sits beside his workshop. As the person who leads the morning exercises, I’m the only apprentice with a key. I patter across the courtyard and its dead gardens to the workshop door. When I move to unlock it, a shadow charges from the darkness.
“Wait! Not without me!” Leonardo pants, catching himself on a wall a second before smacking into it. He’s inexplicably shoeless, clad only in tight-fitting hose and bare-chested underneath his wool cloak. He looks like a ridiculous pagan sorcerer.
My eyebrows pop up. “Were you spying on me?”
“No, I was watching for you. It’s completely different.”
“No it’s not!”
“Of course it is. How else was I supposed to find you? Lurk outside your horrible attic? The younger boys all think it’s haunted, you know. Are you going to let us in, or not?” He flaps his hand. It collides into mine and knocks the key flying.
I roll my eyes and look pointedly at the fallen key. “Gesù Cristo. Must you tonight?”
He stoops so suddenly to pick it up, my own stomach reels. He offers me my key with a flourish. “Yes, I must! Because someone ordered me to do chores all day, and now I’m behind in my work.”
“Right, yes, it’s all my fault you refused to practice this morning,” I grumble.
He hadn’t even attempted to sketch before Giorgio’s outburst. He’d sat there twirling a curl of hair around his finger instead. A token from his new lover? Madonna santa, I hope not. If he’s the reason we endure another plague of lice, I’ll shear off his fetching waves myself.
Sometimes it feels like Leonardo da Vinci joined Verrocchio’s workshop just to punish me.
I’ll never forget the first day his red-blond hair was bobbing around.
He was showing his portfolio to all the artist workshops, trying to get one to bring him on as an apprentice.
When I saw his sketches, it felt like a gut punch, because they were so good.
Better than everyone else’s. Including mine.
The next day he was circling my workshop, being all handsome and jovial, the other apprentices already hanging on his every word, welcoming him like he was the most interesting person they’d ever met.
I hunched on my stool, quietly and inexplicably furious, working on a tiny detailed part of my painting so I had an excuse not to say hello.
But then he sat on me. Yes, on me.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, laughter on his lips. “I didn’t see you there.”
He’s been sitting on me ever since. Metaphorically, of course. I hate it when we touch.
He’s always late, always behind, never around when you need him.
And Verrocchio lets him get away with it because when he does work, everything Leonardo touches sends our patrons to their knees.
Last year, he put finishing details on a David statue that were so vivid, so exquisitely rendered, the lady of the house had to cover it with a sheet to keep her daughters from swooning over it.
Despite all his feckless loafing, his inability to meet a single deadline, and what a disgraceful role model he is for the other apprentices, when Leonardo actually tries, he’s the best artist in the workshop without ever making a bargain with the angel.
Even though thinking the very thought makes me want to rip off my fingernails, it’s still true, and having fewer fingernails won’t make it less true.
And so, with a roll of my eyes, I usher him into the workshop with a sarcastic after you gesture. Leonardo doffs an imaginary cap as he sweeps past me, and my eye twitches.
Tragically, despite me subtly and not so subtly begging him not to, Verrocchio has assigned Leonardo and me to work on the same painting.
Like all Florentine workshops, most of Verrocchio’s commissions are collaborations between artists.
It allows workshops to work harder, faster, to more quickly quench Florence’s endless thirst for beauty.
The breathtaking magnificence is what makes Florence so special, what draws the angels to our city and our city alone.
God-blessed, the church says of Florence.
The angels flock here for beauty, and the magic they provide in return lets Florence strengthen her walls, keep gold in her coffers, heal the sick.
Florence’s wealthy families surround themselves with beauty in the hopes of attracting an angel of their own, to show their allies and enemies alike that even among blessed Florentines, God smiled on their name.
After all, who wouldn’t want their daughter to marry into a home where an angel walked?
Who would dare attack a family so favored by God?
What merchant wouldn’t want to bargain for an internal whisper that said whether or not a deal was good or bad, if the price of silver would rise or fall?
But sometimes I wonder if the wealthy take things too far.
Last week, I painted gold cherubs on a chamber pot.
An actual chamber pot! Shitting gold seems preferable to shitting in gold, but to each his own, I suppose.
It’s not like my family would ever be well-off enough to dream of having their own angel.
I unroll the damp linen protecting my painting palette. “You know, if you spent as much time working as you did fooling around, you’d have your own workshop by now.”
Leonardo shields his eyes from an imaginary sun and pretends to look for something. “Oh yeah? Where’s your workshop, then?”
I scowl at my paints. His question makes me feel like the grayish greenish brownish smear at the palette’s edge.
He’s right. I should have my own workshop by now.
’Tis none of his business why I don’t. Unlike me, Leonardo doesn’t have anyone depending on him.
He can mess around, do whatever he wants when he wants, and there’ll never be any consequences for him.
We’re the two oldest apprentices in the workshop by several years.
I’m still here because I have to be. He’s still here because he can’t be bothered to do anything else.
The unfairness of it twists me up in knots.
“Can we start?” I snap. “I’d like to sleep before sunrise.”
Tobias and the Angel has the marks of a good painting, but not a great one. I stare at the half-finished image, trying to diagnose what’s amiss. “The fish in Tobias’s hand.”
Leonardo gags. “It looks like a slug. A horrible, turgid slug.”
I bite my lip. I will not smile at him when we’re working. It’s a rule of mine. “Do you think you can improve it?”
He rolls up his sleeves, cracking his long, thin fingers. “For you, Virgil? I would happily banish this tumescent slug.”
We lift our brushes. Even if I hadn’t seen Leonardo’s narrow shoulders hunched over the workbench all day, I would’ve known he mixed the paints.
There’s no grittiness, and the egg tempera’s stink is tamed by smoky myrrh.
When I offer a begrudging compliment, he beams like I’ve just proclaimed him the greatest artist of our generation.
“So I’ve been having thoughts,” Leonardo begins.
“Must you share them now?”
“I’ve been thinking of centaurs.”
“Centaurs?”
“Yes. Half man, half horse. Surely, you’re familiar with them.”
My eyes dart again to the purple mark on his neck. “No. Please tell me—”
Leonardo flaps his hands, his brush dripping on his lap. “Get your mind out of the gutter! I was thinking if a centaur has one pair of arms and four legs, then that would mean it has six limbs total—”
“That is how counting works, yes.”
“So if there’s six limbs, this would mean that a centaur is an insect, would it not?”
I turn—fully turn—toward him. He’s near breathless, eyes huge with excitement. To my surprise, the slug-fish is almost fixed. It’s not the first time his mind has spun off in one direction while his hands went off in another. Despite my best efforts to stop it, my mouth bows, a barely there bend.
“Would this mean a man riding a horse would be a spider, then? Because of the eight limbs?”
Leonardo rubs his chin pensively, smearing it with paint. “Now that’s a very good question.”
I turn my laugh into a snort, and then, miracle of miracles, the painting transforms from good to great as blue moonlight spills through the workshop.
It’s so cold, I can’t feel my toes, but the sounds of Leonardo’s breathing, the quiet shift of his body, are something like warmth. I slowly grow aware of him watching me.
The sleeves of my chemise fall to mid-forearm, revealing the black lines scoring my skin. Each one is the mark of a bargain I made with the angel. Each one represented a day, a week, or a month, of my life. There are hundreds of them.
When a workshop is blessed by an angel, the angel’s magic can be borrowed by artists, for a price. Part of the artist’s life or a memory for a taste of magic. Big bargains backfire, but small ones strike gold. There is an art to making bargains, and I’m a master.
A month of my life to never have my hands shake while painting with ultramarine, the most expensive pigment in the workshop.
A day for the perfect memory of a snowy tree in mid-summer.
Half a year to never have my paints go dry, even if I forget to cover them all day.
The moment where the image is still caught between my head and my hands is no longer one of frustration.
The magic smooths it, soothes it, and without it, everything would take me six times as long.
I don’t know how many years of my life I’ve bartered away at this point, but it might be decades.
“Be careful,” Verrocchio warned me at the last Epiphany feast. His charcoal-stained finger skimmed down the latest mark on my flesh, still tender and raised. “You don’t want to forget how to make art without magic.”
I just shrugged. If I could afford to be sparing with my bargains—if my family could afford to keep the roof over their heads without the money I earned—I might’ve listened.
Niccolo wouldn’t have wanted this for you, a vile, soft part of my heart whispers before I can strangle it.
No. If my brother hadn’t wanted this for me, he wouldn’t have left me to carry the weight of supporting our mother and sisters alone.
“Are you all right?” Leonardo says.
This close, it’s impossible not to notice his arms are free of bargain marks.
No magic steadies his hand or clears Leonardo’s mind.
Every other artist in the workshop has bargained with the angel, but years into his apprenticeship, he still refuses.
Whenever someone asks him why, he smiles mysteriously and changes the subject.
I admire and resent him for it. If he gave an angel perhaps even a year of his life, how much more could he do?
If I had his talent with my magic, I’d be the most successful artist in Florence.
Perhaps even in all of Europe. My family’s money troubles would be gone.
I’d finally have a life free of worry and other people’s expectations.
I flick my wrists. My sleeves flutter lower, hiding the marks. “Why wouldn’t I be all right?”
Leonardo nods toward the painting. “Because that dog looks like a tasseled pillow.”
I startle and pull back just enough to get a better look at what I’ve done. And… merda, he’s right. “Looks more like a spider to me.”
“Yes, but not a horse-man spider.” Before I can tell him not to, Leonardo runs his fingers over the brushstrokes. “It’s already dry.”
I bite the inside of my cheek so hard, I taste copper.
“It’s all right,” he says hurriedly. “It’s just a mistake.”
“It’s not.” I never make mistakes. Not on almost finished paintings as important as this one. The next morning unspools itself with awful clarity. Verrocchio entering his workshop, his horrified scream when he sees the mess I made. Cristo santo, I won’t be paid this week now, will I?
Leonardo’s long fingers hover before me. “Can I have your brush to fix it? My fish turned out.”
My fingers won’t loosen. Everything in me goes against letting the other boy take over. “Dogs don’t have scales,” I snap.
“They’re not covered with a thousand little millipede legs either.”
The cursed millipede dog swims before me.
The first bargain I made after my brother left was a decade of my life for a sense of when a painting was going wrong.
The staggering price should’ve frightened me—when I told Verrocchio, he had to sit down—but instead, it felt like freedom.
Art always takes something from its maker.
Your time, your eyesight, a piece of your heart—why not give it ten years instead?
At least then I’d know exactly what I was losing.
“Virgil,” Leonardo says, not looking at me. “What happens to the bargains you make with an angel when he dies instead of going back to heaven?”
Every black mark on my skin burns like a bargain newly struck. I inhale sharply, the horrible truth worming through my veins. Human life keeps the angels alive, but Verrocchio’s angel was killed. Which means—
All the magic, all the power I bartered away my life for, is gone.