Chapter Seventeen
Lupa parades through the Florentine streets like a queen, Leonardo and me trailing after her. Two bumbling, bickering attendants.
“Why is she taking us to the apothecary?” Leonardo says when we go north of the duomo. “You already got the pigments this week.”
My insides tense when we pass people holding camphor-drenched rags to their noses and mouths. “We’re not picking up pigments.”
We’re going back to the scene of the angry mob.
This time, when the people turn toward us, their eyes slide over Lupa and settle hungrily on me and Leonardo. I give away the last of my focaccia to the first child who begs for it, but my fine clothes still scream wealthy outsider!
I keep one hand on the knife at my belt. I barely know how to use it, but after Lupa startled me, I didn’t want to be caught off guard and unarmed again.
The dirty piazza is nearly the same as before, except more crowded. People coughing on one another, breathing in the same rank air full of pestilence. I cover my mouth and nose with my hand to avoid inhaling the miasma.
Leonardo doesn’t bother. “I’m not certain disease is caused by miasma, you know.”
“We’ll see if you still feel that way when you start choking on your snot.”
A crowd gathers around the cracked fountain, filling up their buckets. Leonardo’s nose scrunches at the green algae staining the white marble basin. “Are people really supposed to drink that?”
The water has a yellow tinge to it. “I think this is all they have.”
The mob wasn’t wrong to be angry with me before; I just didn’t want to be their scapegoat.
The Medici threaten to take my family’s house, but how much more have they taken from these people, who have so much less to begin with?
People forced to work for long hours and low wages in foul conditions?
Florence is a republic, but the Medici might as well be kings.
“Come!” Lupa muscles to the fountain’s edge. The crowd parts for her easily, their attention sluicing off her like water from glass. She must be using magic to make herself unnoticed.
The same can’t be said for me and Leonardo.
“Come to gawk at us—”
“Eating fat figs in their golden halls—”
“The likes of them are not welcome here…”
The back of my neck stings. Clapping a hand over it, I whirl around, half expecting to see someone tickling it with a blade. “Hey, Lupa, remember what happened last time? If you’re going to do something, think you could hurry up and do it?”
She hisses and flutters her hands over the fountain’s filthy edge. “Give me your knife.”
I’m not thrilled to hand over our only weapon, but the sooner we leave, the sooner I won’t need it anymore. I offer Lupa my dagger.
She grabs it by the sharpened edge and squeezes.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Leonardo claps a hand over his mouth, gagging.
A gush of gold drips from Lupa’s hand into the water. The crowd gasps and screams, half of them lurching away, half heaving forward for a better look. Someone pushes Leonardo from behind and nearly knocks him in. I steady him by the waist, snarling a curse over my shoulder.
“Look!” a child cries with a pointed finger.
As the gold eddies through the water, it doesn’t dilute. Instead the water shimmers clear, then gold itself, a pale, translucent shade that reminds me of delicate gold leaf on the very tip of my brush.
A woman dips her palm into the glowing water and trickles it into the mouth of her coughing toddler. The pink flush of health fills her wan cheeks. She giggles, and the crowd hushes.
Tears sparkle in the young mother’s eyes. “The angels have blessed our corner of the city at last!”
The cry zips through the crowd, catching faster than fire, swelling mightier than a flood.
Lupa’s brow is beaded with moisture, her pointed teeth are bared in a grimace. She squeezes the dagger tighter and gasps as the trickle becomes a sickening gush. “Stop, you’ll hurt yourself!” I grab her wrist, forcing her to release the knife.
It plunges into the water.
Lupa doubles over, tendons going rigid in her neck, her hands curling into fists. When they unclench, there’s not a single mark on the skin, but her teeth chatter. She sways once, twice—
Leonardo and I catch her before she falls. He’s breathing quickly, eyes bouncing from the golden fountain waters to Lupa. “I thought angels could only make bargains with the workshop or house they were bound to?”
That was the entire point of the binding ceremony, was it not? Why else would Lupa sink her teeth into our palms and the priest proclaim she belonged to us and only us?
“This was no bargain. I asked these people for nothing,” Lupa pants.
“Are you allowed to do that?” I harden my voice to hide the tremble. To hell with Verrocchio being cross with me for letting Lupa escape again. She’s using magic in a way I’ve never seen before, never heard of angels using before. It feels wrong, blasphemous. A violation I should report to someone.
But as I watch the magicked water stop coughs and cure runny eyes, I can’t deny that something about it also feels indeterminably right.
Why is she so different?
Lupa’s eyes burn green-gold, the pupils nearly swallowed by the light. “I don’t know,” she says softly.
I shiver, unsure if she’s answering the question I’ve asked aloud or the one I’ve thought.
Leonardo jerks his chin toward the duomo’s distant shape, closer to home. The only thing that causes more of a riot than murder is a miracle, and we’re in the epicenter of the biggest miracle Florence has seen since the first angel stumbled out the cathedral’s doors.
We leave, fighting against an endless stream of people hurrying to the golden fountain, the rumors of a well that cures all illness already racing to every edge of the neighborhood. People fall to their knees, crying and giving thanks to heaven.
“See?” Lupa leans heavily on both of us. “I can help people too.”
I open my mouth—but nothing comes out. What is there to say? Everything I thought I knew about angels has been upended. I don’t know how I feel about it or what to think.
“I saw. I believe you.” Leonardo tugs on his bottom lip, lost in thought.
A cicada-buzz chirrs in my ears. The longer Leonardo stays quiet, the louder it swells. He’s never kept a thought to himself, so what’s he thinking now? What did he see back there that I didn’t? I need him to tell me so I can make sense of it.
“You all right?” I finally ask.
He shakes himself a bit. His gaze rises, full of resolve. “Will you make a bargain with me, Lupa?”
The buzz becomes a roar. “You don’t make bargains!”
“I’m allowed to change my mind, aren’t I?”
Obviously. I have no right to tell him what to do. But a hot feeling swirls through me, uneasy and wrong. It feels like a bad idea—one I need to talk him out of. “Why now? How can you trust it’ll work?”
I gasp when his cool fingers trace my exposed bargain marks. “You trusted it would work. Over and over again.”
Gooseflesh puckers my useless scars. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, I want to say. “You didn’t answer my first question.”
His smile is sly, cajoling. One meant to make me forget. “Are you my mother now?”
“If I must be. Someone needs to talk sense to you.”
He stops walking, slipping his arm around Lupa’s shoulders so the half-conscious angel doesn’t fall. His smile sinks into a long, dark look that makes me swallow. “I promise this bargain will help us with the Medici commission, but you’ve got to trust me.”
’Tis not a question of trusting him. But how can I explain the anxious thrum rattling my bones? The horrible sense that this is somehow about me?
You know he’ll never tell if you keep asking him.
Curse his stubbornness. I cross my arms with a huff, hiding my feelings behind a defiant chin. “Fine! I hope you don’t regret it.”
Leonardo laughs softly. I can’t be sure, but I think I feel him brush my side as we start walking again. “I don’t think I will.”