Chapter Five
I hold up the length of emerald brocade again, hoping the fourth time will be the charm. My voice is cajoling, an inch shy of despairing. “This is a dress. You must wear it, please.”
The angel’s nose wrinkles. “Why?”
“Because you’ll get cold.”
“I do not get cold, see?” She grabs my hand and presses it to her bare shoulder.
Her skin burns fever-hot. I jerk away, eyes sliding toward the kitchen door.
There’s no doubt all the servants are gathered behind it, listening and waiting to gleefully share every embarrassing failure of mine with the entire workshop as soon as possible.
“Well, perhaps you won’t get cold, but it makes everyone feel better,” I say.
“Why is that?”
“Because… people don’t show their bodies to one another.”
Her eyebrows rise incredulously. “Ever?”
I grimace, the purple mark on Leonardo’s neck popping into my head. An image both unwelcome and unnecessary. “Only… only during very special circumstances.”
She drums jagged, dirty fingernails against her chair’s arm. “And what are these special circumstances?”
A blush finally overtakes my cheeks. “You’ll know when they happen.”
She lifts a finger and pokes my face, eyeing my blush with a frank, blunt curiosity that would be unspeakably rude coming from anyone else. “It seems inconvenient to have a body.”
Well, there’s no counterargument for that. I mash a hand against my brow. My sister Elisabetta refused to wear clothes for an entire summer, and I’ve drawn more nude women than I can count, but none of that prepared me for her.
“What about your name? Could you tell me that?” I ask, more than a bit desperately.
She sulks and hunches farther into her chair. “The man in the robes gave me a name. It is a bad name. I don’t like it.”
I smile coaxingly. “It can’t be all that bad.”
She plucks a loose thread on her chair and pulls.
An embroidered rose slowly disappears from the fine upholstery.
I watch it unravel with hopeless resignation, wanting to tell her to stop it, but afraid of what she’ll do if I say so.
“He called me Maddalena, but it is not my name. It belongs to someone else.”
“Many people have the same name.” Surely she knows this already… right? There are four Giovannis in the workshop.
She hisses and rips out the entire rose with one savage yank. “It’s not mine!”
“All right, good God, I’m sorry! We’ll—we’ll call you whatever you want, then.”
The angel stops assailing the embroidery, anger replaced by suspicion in an instant. “How do you know God? You’re no angel.”
“You’re not the first person to say so.” I swallow a smile. She’s an angel, but there’s nothing saintly or holy about this half-feral creature. It’s… amusing, when it’s not terrifying, or teeth-squealingly frustrating.
I realize I don’t know what the old angel’s name was and feel a pinch of guilt that I never thought to ask.
He was so different from her. It’s hard to believe they’re the same type of creature at all, were it not for the gold gleam that shines in her irises when the light strikes them the right way.
I can’t stop thinking of the snarling wolf from my childhood. “Can I call you Lupa?”
“Lupa?”
“It means she-wolf. A wolf is an animal, a predator.” I pause, not sure how honest I should be. “You remind me of one.”
She unspools from the armchair, a muscle moving in her jaw. “Men fear this animal?”
My thumb runs along the tooth punctures on my palm. “If they know what’s good for them.”
The angel smiles delightedly, the expression baring each one of her pointed teeth. “I like Lupa. Choosing one’s own name is allowed?”
I think of the day I shed being the third Niccolo Pitti like it was a too-small coat.
Niccolo had read the poet Dante’s Inferno to me and my sisters so much, the book’s parchment had grown puppy-ear soft in the corners where we turned the pages.
The ancient poet Virgil was Dante’s companion through the underworld.
I liked the idea of being someone who led people through the darkness.
I like thinking I can still be that person.
I worried Niccolo would see the name I told Master Verrocchio to write in his ledger as a rejection of him, but he hadn’t. He hugged me so hard, my bones cracked, and said, “I love it. You deserve to have something all yours.”
What would he think of this girl angel?
Sometimes I miss my brother so much, the pain feels like a gaping hole inside me.
Even though I’m angry he left, ashamed I’m the reason why, bigger than the bad feelings is the ache of his absence.
Each time I turn to him and he’s not there is a savage kick, but the day turning to him isn’t my first instinct anymore? It’ll be a knife through my heart.
My voice grows rough. “I don’t care if it’s allowed or not! You can be whoever you want to be.” Not wanting the angel to notice I’m shaken, I close my eyes and let out a long, measured breath. “I’ll support you, even if you insist on being covered in lice.”
The angel—Lupa—throws back her head and laughs. The sound comes from deep in her belly and fills the entire room, wild and impolite and so utterly right, that I feel my mouth lift.
There’s a knock. Verrocchio’s housekeeper stands at the door. “Signore, I have drawn water for a bath.”
Lupa freezes. “What is a bath?”
My smile grows wider. “It’s a very special circumstance. I think you’ll like it.”
Lupa settles into the hot water with a contented sigh, even uses the soap and washrag with my instructions. I take on her snarled, lice-ridden hair myself, letting the soap sink into the brassy strands before attacking them with a comb.
In the fire-warmed kitchens, surrounded by the scent of sage and lemon, I can almost pretend she’s one of my sisters and not a divine being strong enough to tear out my throat with her bare hands.
“And you must scrub a body every week?” Lupa asks.
“Just your own body,” I clarify, lest she get the wrong idea. “You must always ask someone before you touch them. That’s an important rule to remember.”
Lupa hmms and sinks lower into the bubbles. I brush her hair and pause. There’s a ropey spiderweb of scars behind her ear, the tissue still pink.
A cold, uneasy feeling swirls through my chest. “What happened here?”
Lupa touches the scar. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember? Or you don’t know?” I fight to keep my voice even.
The quiet stretches longer and longer. Lupa keeps tracing the scar, one jagged fingernail digging in too deep. A bead of dark gold blood wells up.
“I think I was created this way.” She twists to meet my gaze, unease on her face. “Is it wrong?”
Wrong? ’Tis impossible. I have never heard of an angel needing to recover from anything.
Every time the old angel injured himself—often, in a workshop filled with knives and fire and jagged bits of marble—his wounds closed up with a gleam of gold, leaving behind nothing. This wound is obviously still healing.
I trace the scar, my touch featherlight. Why does she have this?
She’s not yours to look after. This isn’t your problem.
There must be a perfectly acceptable reason for it.
Perhaps Lupa has not fully come into her powers yet.
Didn’t the priest say she was young? It must take time for angelic powers to settle.
It would explain her feral nature, how she seems at once both so much wilder and so much more human than the old angel.
I begin to braid her hair. “There’s nothing wrong, but if it bothers you, you tell me. All right?”
Lupa dips her head forward, pressing into my touch like a purring cat. “All right.”
The pink, raw scar disappears beneath the braid. As her hair flies through my fingers, I can’t help but wonder:
Why is Lupa so different?
And how soon will it be before I can make my next bargain with her?