Chapter Eighteen
Easter in Florence always arrives with a bang. Quite literally.
The streets are packed with jubilant crowds as the Carro del Fuoco lurches from the Porta al Prato to the Piazza del Duomo pulled by its six white oxen.
The wagon looks like a tiered cake, each gold-and-green layer more exquisite than the one below.
Sparklers fizz along its sides, and plumes of red and green smoke ribbon from its very top, a hint of the dazzling fireworks display to come when it reaches the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore.
“Have you ever wondered,” Leonardo says as we weave through the packed piazza, “why we celebrate Easter by exploding a fancy wagon?”
“It’s not like the wagon explodes. Just the fireworks it carries.” Someone stomps on my foot, and I wince.
“Right, but why fireworks, specifically? Is there a bit about Jesus and fireworks in the Bible?”
“You really don’t pay attention in mass, do you?” Someone else bumps into me, and I stumble. Leonardo grabs my wrist. He doesn’t let go, even when I’m on my feet again. His smile is roguish and huge and only for me.
“C’mon, Virgil. The lecture isn’t the most interesting part of church!”
I think of all the masses we’ve endured squashed together thigh to thigh on a too-crowded pew and frown. I don’t think we’re talking about Jesus anymore. Wait. Cristo santo, he’s not… flirting with me, is he?
Of course he is. He flirts with everything that moves. My eyes flicker down to the fresh black line on his wrist. But things are different now.
No amount of wheedling will get Leonardo to reveal what Lupa promised him, even though I desperately, fervently want to know.
For my own knowledge, of course. Not for any other reason.
If he’s gained an edge that can help us win the Medici wedding portrait commission, I deserve to know.
My family needs the money more than he does.
“It’s my own business, Virgil,” he said bluntly last night, turning away from our painting to face me fully. “Or are you the only one allowed to have secrets?”
I sulked under his lifted, prim expression but refused to let him bait me. “Lorenzo’s hand looks like he’s trying to strangle his bride. Can you fix the fingers?”
The nights leading up to Easter all ran together in a sfumato haze of layering sketches on the Medici wedding portrait panel.
My fingers were still clumsy, artless sausages, but my eyes worked just fine, and I’d convinced Leonardo to paint Lorenzo and his bride in profile, him coming to the window of her room: the opposite of the journey she will make to him. Not a marriage but a welcoming.
“That’s good, I like it!” Leonardo exclaimed when I walked him through it. He didn’t sound surprised, but he did sound proud, and I turned away before he could notice my unexpected smile.
Leonardo stops us against a wall until the crowd surges past, following the Carro del Fuoco rumbling down the street just ahead. When he finally releases my hand, it feels cold.
“Shall we?” He nods south, away from the cathedral and its Easter celebrations.
“Let’s go.”
Today is the day we break into the Palazzo della Signoria and go through Piero de’ Medici’s records.
Waiting until Easter was Leonardo’s idea.
It’s a feast day, so the palazzo should be less crowded, less guarded.
And now that Lorenzo de’ Medici is done sitting for his portrait, no one will suspect the artists of wrongdoing if we mess something up.
We melt away from the last of the crowd. Lupa waits for us beneath a street tabernacle, dressed in the trousers and shirt I loaned her. She grins and catches her fist in her hand at the sight of us. “Yes, it is time for crimes!”
I shush her. “Crimes are bad, remember?”
Her mouth pulls sideways. “If they are so bad, why does doing them feel so good?”
We take a roundabout way to the Palazzo della Signoria.
There’s an eerie, abandoned feel to the city, heightened by the distant roar of the crowd at the cathedral.
In the absence of people, the shuttered windows overhead feel like judgmental eyes, all of them watching us with reproach.
The feeling of being watched grows stronger when the Palazzo della Signoria’s austere clock tower rises above the red rooftops.
I’m not doing anything wrong, I remind myself angrily. The palazzo is a government building. This is a republic. I’m merely trying to obtain information about a missing person. If answers about my brother lie within those stone walls, I deserve to know what they are. My entire family does.
“Here.” I stop beside a wooden door. Flies buzz over barrels of food scraps. We’re entering through the kitchens. Since today is a holiday, all the servants will have the day off.
Leonardo tugs the knob. “It’s locked.”
I straighten my shoulders and nod, my heart beating faster. “Lupa?”
She replaces Leonardo.
At first, nothing happens. But then an eldritch breeze lifts her hair.
Gold glimmers in her eyes, the flash of a predator’s stare in the dark.
I can’t feel the breeze on my face, but I can feel it inside—a whisper of wrongness just under my skin, the feeling of padding too close to a graveyard at midnight.
Something inside the lock clinks.
The wrong feeling lessens at once. I shake my head, ridding myself of its last dregs. “Let’s go.”
The kitchen is warm and dark, the fire banked to embers in the wide hearth.
Bread dough proofs on a flour-dusted table and fills the air with a sweet, funky smell that’s not entirely unpleasant.
Lupa marches to the door leading deeper into the palazzo as Leonardo gently shuts the outside one behind us.
He snags my sleeve when I go to follow her.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he says, too low for the angel to hear us.
“Yes?” I don’t understand why he’s asking this.
He tips his head. The wind has had its way with his hair, and I can’t read his expression. “You won’t be able to unlearn what you discover.”
I grimace, not wanting to talk about this now. “What do you mean?”
He loosens a breath, like he doesn’t want to say it. “The Medici aren’t good people, Virgil. If your brother is or was working with them in secret…”
Then your brother might not be a good person either.
The implication is a striking viper; I recoil from the danger instinctively. “You don’t know the first thing about him!”
But I can’t forget Niccolo’s warning in the Inferno.
The one I never told Leonardo about. My brother told me not to follow him, and here I am, doing exactly that.
I assumed he was shooing me away from danger, but what if he had another reason?
Like mold behind a gilded wall, once you peel back the wood, there’s no ignoring the rot beneath.
Leonardo lifts his hands placatingly. “I can see I’ve overstepped. I’m sorry.”
“You have.” He’s only looking out for me, but I never asked him to and I don’t want it. I hitch my shoulders higher and cross the room, not waiting for him. There’s a soft, frustrated sigh, and then Leonardo’s footsteps are shadowing my own.
Outside the kitchen door is a dark, unadorned corridor. A servants’ passage. When the door closes behind us, we’re shut off in complete darkness. There’s a faint noise, and I blink as a glow erupts on Lupa’s hand.
“You can conjure fire from nothing?” Leonardo says, aghast.
She turns, frowning. “Yes?” A dying coal is pinched in her long fingernails. “Can’t everyone with an ember?”
She touches the coal to a lantern’s wick, and it sputters to life. The scent of burnt hair wars with the dampness, but she doesn’t act like it singed her. “Lead us, Virgil.”
It takes me a bit, but I navigate out of the warren of servants’ tunnels and up the palazzo’s endless steps to the offices above.
Leonardo holds the lantern, and Lupa walks ahead, boldly rounding each corner with a confidence that makes my stomach curl.
I know she’s made herself invisible to everyone but us, but it feels wrong to see her walk like she has nothing to hide.
She guides us around a handful of guards, one on each floor.
Soon we’re outside the double doors leading to Piero’s office. The ones I’ve schemed and dreamed how to get behind for weeks. Leonardo runs a finger along one of the carved panels, frowning. “The Last Judgment is a grim choice, isn’t it?”
That’s what I thought when I saw the doors the first time. “Wait until you see the inside.”
When we enter, Leonardo gasps with horror. “Dolce Gesù, he’s looking at me!”
The wrapped portraits I found before are gone, as is the mess, but the muscular, menacing portrait of God still towers over us. Even though the painting isn’t magicked, his eyes appear to follow me as I go to the shelves filled with fat ledgers.
“I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all,” Leonardo mutters.
I’ve never agreed with him more in my entire life. “The sooner we find my brother, the sooner we can leave.” I beeline to the one incompletely filled shelf and ease off the final ledger, flipping to the last page.
Someone has finished the portrait catalogue since I was here. My stomach sparks when I find the number on Niccolo’s portrait—512—and show Leonardo the date.
“February 28, 1467,” he says.
It’s a few weeks after Niccolo disappeared, but there’s nothing else special about it. I fist my curls, already feeling frustrated. “What am I supposed to do with that?”
Leonardo swoops closer. Ignoring my protests, he closes the ledger and taps a number stamped on its spine. “Seven one six. See how the ledgers on this shelf have three numbers on their spines and the other ones have nine on theirs? It’s a cataloguing system.”
It takes me a moment to catch up. “There’s more information in another book?”
“Precisely!” Giddy with delight, he flies to another shelf. I slip the portrait catalogue back in its spot and follow just as he pulls a book with 716-459-840 on it from the shelf.
I groan when he flips it open. There are thousands of entries: births, deaths, arrests, job offers.
Leonardo turns to the section numbered with 512 at the top, but there are at least ten pages with the label, all of them filled with handwriting so small, the thought of reading it makes me dizzy.
I’m twelve again, a stammering mess before my tutor, my father a storm at my back.
“I don’t see anything.” He’s reading the left page, but I can’t force myself to make the words on the right page focus. Between God’s judgmental, staring eyes and the imposing throne, it feels like we’re not alone. When the churches chime the quarter hour, I flinch and nearly tear a page in two.
“Niccolo Pitti, right?” Leonardo’s nose is an inch above a page, one finger keeping his place.
Hope bursts through me. “Yes!”
“Someone’s coming!” Lupa whisper-hisses from her post outside the door. “Several someones!”
My pulse surges. I butt Leonardo out of the way, a familiar name in tiny script snagging my eyes just above his fingertip.
Niccolo Pitti, sworn into city service February.
Appointment status: current
Work address—
Lupa bursts into the room. “Hide!”
The address disappears. Leonardo yanks the ledger away and slides it back onto the shelf. I try to claw it from him, anger kicking through me. “I didn’t get the address!”
I leap for the ledger. My fingers graze the spine, and it tumbles down.
There’s a murmur outside the door. The knob starts to turn—
“I’m sorry, Virgil, I truly am.” Leonardo tackles me and drags me under the table and its tablecloth, his eyes agonized.
Not a moment too soon.
The doors open with a swell of male voices, and footsteps shuffle into the room. I can just see their shoes through the gap between the tablecloth’s edge and the floor. The fabric still trembles where we dove under it. Leonardo stops it with a single finger, his face stricken.
“Signori, seat yourselves. We have much to discuss before we’re missed at the celebrations.”
Dread bubbles in my gut at the familiar voice. I bite the meaty part of my hand to hold back a gasp.
It’s Piero de’ Medici.
And we’re trapped in his office until he leaves.