Chapter Twenty-One
The Medici want to speak to you.”
I flinch, sending my and Leonardo’s painting palette crashing to the workshop floor. “Why would they ever want to do that?”
Verrocchio drags his frown up from the rainbow smear on his shoes. “Because you two are working on the workshop’s wedding commission for them?”
I put down my brush with a shaking hand, trying to ignore the simmering panic in my belly. If Leonardo is also panicking, he’s hiding it better than me, though his eyes have seemed unfocused lately, clouded with thoughts he doesn’t share.
After making me scatter sawdust on the paint spill, Verrocchio motions someone at the workshop door forward.
A solicitous little man with spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose comes forward, his wrinkled hands clasped behind his stooped back.
Not Piero or Lorenzo, but someone employed by the Medici household.
I pull a hand down my mouth, shoulders relaxing. Cristo santo, Verrocchio really should be more specific with his Medici. ’Tis rude to frighten someone half to death.
The man presses his nose so close to the canvas, I expect him to come away with paint on it. “Hmm, no magic in this yet?”
I glance at Leonardo to catch his eye, but he’s not looking at me. “Erm… no.”
The man’s spectacles magnify his stare, making my skin prickle. “Have you two worked with magic before? The Medici are eager to work with a personal painter who feels comfortable with the angels’ gifts.”
Oh ho, I imagine they are! I choke back a snort and hold out my forearms. “Yeah, I’ve made a bargain or two before.”
The Medici’s man examines the long rows of black marks scoring my skin, and bows with a supercilious smile. “My masters will be pleased to hear it.”
As suddenly as he arrived, he’s gone, walking out with Verrocchio.
It’s odd for a patron to send someone to examine their commission before it’s done, odder still that the Medici’s man barely looked at our painting at all.
I think we could’ve shown him a painting of Giorgio’s infamous phallic fruits and he wouldn’t have noticed.
I slide closer to Leonardo as soon as the workshop door closes. “What do you think all that was about?”
He doesn’t answer. He takes about a century filling in a detail on Lorenzo’s collar with the tip of his brush before his eyes flick to mine, dark and unreadable. “C’mon, Virgil. Do we really need to talk about it? I think you already know.”
His annoyance feels like getting snapped at by a friendly hound. “What’s your problem these days?”
He bites his lip and drags a hand through his hair, clearly about to launch into a lecture of some kind—then he sighs and lets the red-gold mass tumble to his shoulders. “You know what? I’m not going to explain this one to you.”
“Explain what to me?”
“It’ll come to you or it won’t,” he says lightly, sidestepping me to go replace the paints I’ve ruined without making eye contact.
I gape at his retreating back. Unbelievable! What have I done to upset him?
Lupa slouches forward with a furrowed brow. She’s sitting in a chair behind me, one of the garden cats curled around her neck. “Humans confuse me,” she says. “He wants to spend time with you, then he does not suddenly. Why is this?”
“A very good question,” I mutter darkly.
There was a time in the not-so-recent past when I wouldn’t have given a damn what Leonardo felt about me, but judging from the tight, buzzing feeling in my chest as I stare at him hunching over the pigment table, I now care quite a bit what he thinks of me. Sodding hell, I didn’t ask for this!
I beckon Lupa closer, whispering so the half-finished putto statues can’t overhear. Putti are terrible gossips. “I think I hurt his feelings.”
She inhales deeply, nostrils flaring. “I smell no blood. What part of the body are the feelings in?”
“They’re in your head.”
“They are not real, then?”
“No, they are. When the cat purrs on your lap, what do you do?”
Lupa scoffs, as if my question is insultingly dull. “I stay still because the cat is on me.”
“Right, but why do you stay still? Do you like it when the cat purrs?”
Her frown bends, becomes a pensive line. Her fingers sink into the fur around the cat’s neck, and the creature relaxes more blissfully against her. “I like it. It makes me want to stay.”
“That’s a feeling.”
A spark of understanding strikes across her face. “I have tasted them in memories. All you need to do is find a way to unhurt the feelings, then! Where is the cure? The apothecary?”
If only it were that simple! Leonardo said he wasn’t ready to forgive Lupa, but he’s upset with me. I can’t imagine why, because last I knew, I was not the dastardly villain lying about demons being angels—
My insides clench with a horrid realization.
His beloved stepmother died because of bargains.
What if it had been Niccolo in her place?
How would I feel if I learned demons had stolen his life?
Leonardo was honest with me about the worst moment of his past—something he’d never shared with anyone else at the workshop—and when the moment mattered for me to remember, to care about how what we had just discovered might bruise his deepest, oldest wound…
I said nothing. Didn’t even think about it.
I groan, forehead thumping to the worktable. This is bad, even for me.
I’ve got to make it up to him.
Verrocchio’s eyebrows rise at the plink of my coin purse on his desk later that afternoon. “I’d like to commission a bronze piece.”
“Are you certain?”
It’s not unheard of for an apprentice to place a commission, but I’ve never done it before, and he knows I’m supporting my family.
Mamma could always use a spare denier: for my sisters, meals, entertaining other wealthy Florentines so she can preserve our family’s reputation.
She’d scream if she knew I had extra money and hadn’t given it to her.
I push the coins closer to Verrocchio. “I am.”
He sweeps my money away before I can change my mind. “All right. What do you want? I reckon I can get it done by next—”
“I was hoping to make it myself—if that’s all right?” A nervy spasm tangles the statement into a question.
Is it my imagination, or does Verrocchio hide a smile in a cough? “Trying to impress someone, ragazzo?”
My blush blazes down to my bones. “No! Of course not.”
Verrocchio waves me off, not believing me for a second. “ ’Tis none of my business anyway. Shall I go show you how to use the tools?”
“No, I’ll work it out myself.”
Verrocchio’s eyebrows rise. I raise my chin so he knows I mean it. Then one of his eyebrows rises even higher, nearly touching his red cap.
I cross my arms, going for confidence and not petulance. “I can do it. Truly.”
This time, my master doesn’t bother to hide his amusement. “Suit yourself. It’s harder than it looks.”
He’s not wrong. It takes me three days to get it right.
The other apprentices ask me what I’m doing, why I’m working with metal and not paint, but I snarl at them to shut it and leave me.
I don’t want the surprise ruined. When my head is down, I feel Leonardo watching me from behind the Medici wedding portrait, his gaze a hand on the back of my neck, but he always makes sure I never catch him looking.
His curiosity should distract me, but instead it feels like the vanishing point—the thing which all my time and effort race toward.
When it’s finished, I return to my spot beside Leonardo and resume working on the wedding portrait.
Now that we’re working with paint, it’s becoming glaringly, humiliatingly obvious that without magic, I’m useless.
I glob the paint on too thickly, shade too heavily or not enough.
A few days ago, I tried to blend a dab of white around Lorenzo’s eye just to realize too late it wasn’t paint at all: A sodding pigeon had shat on the painting from the rafters.
Leonardo always waits until everyone leaves at the end of the workday to fix my errors so no one notices.
He does it silently, neither of us talking about it, a snide comment never leaving his lips.
’Tis far nicer than I deserve, which is why my heart is pounding while I wait for the workshop to clear out for the night.
When the door closes behind the last apprentice, Leonardo breaks the taut silence first. “What’s with all the fidgeting today?” He tilts his head, smirking. “Eager to tell me what I’ve done wrong with the painting?”
For the first time, I understand that his smooth smiles and witty words are a mask. He hides behind them just the way I do my frowns. “I like what you’re doing. I haven’t had anything to say about it for days.”
“I noticed,” he says lightly, carefully, those dark eyes never leaving mine for a moment. “What have you been doing with Verrocchio’s metalworking tools? Giorgio’s saying you’re making a great, big golden phallus for Lorenzo de’ Medici.”
Giorgio would think that. “I was making you this.”
He squints at the misshapen lump on my palm, an unreadable expression dashing across his face for a blink. “What is it?”
Why has my heart crawled up into my throat?
“A locket. You’re too careless with your stepmother’s hair.
You might put it through the wash, or one of the cats might eat it, and then you’d be all sad and demand that everyone poke apart their hairballs for weeks—” I cut myself off.
Madonna santa. Why do my mouth and brain conspire against me?
I’m supposed to be begging for his forgiveness, not telling him how he’s doing everything wrong.
I swallow, chagrin and regret hot cinders shooting through my veins. “Sorry. I’m not good at saying the right thing.”
Leonardo’s mouth twitches. “You’re really not.
It’s astonishing how bad you are at it.” But there’s no malice behind the words.
Leonardo takes the locket from me. It looks ridiculous all of a sudden.
Ugly, the edges uneven and jagged, the color somewhere between amber and gold.
Because I couldn’t afford a chain, it’s strung on a leather loop that’s already fraying.
I was so proud when I strung the loop through it this afternoon, but seeing all its imperfections in his hand makes me want to snatch it back. “If you don’t want it—”
“I do.” He opens the back and plucks the dark curl from his pocket.
And hesitates.
The back of my neck cools with sweat. Is there something wrong? Did Giorgio add an embellishment to the metal when I wasn’t looking? “Are you sure? Because you’re not acting like—”
He puts the hair inside the hollow and snaps it closed. “It’s marvelous. Thank you.”
Marvelous? ’Tis serviceable at best, and we both know it. “But?”
He bites his lip. Then words spill out quickly. “I’m not careless. I just try not to hold on too hard to the things I cherish.”
Wait, he wants to lose the last thing he has of his stepmother? I cross my arms and lean back on my stool. “You wouldn’t happen to be like this about your money, too, would you? Because there’s this house I’d love to buy.”
He grimaces, like he’d rather not say more about it. “It makes it easier when… things leave. I can pretend I lost them instead.”
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of them leaving me,” he confesses to the painting.
“Your stepmother didn’t mean to leave you.
That’s not why she made her bargains.” I run my tongue along the back of my teeth, oddly angry.
I can’t tell if it’s at him or for him. “That’s a rubbish way to think.
Does anyone deserve the people they cherish?
” I think of my brother’s face crinkled with laughter, the sea of kindness in him that had no horizon.
“Perhaps, but my father did leave me here and told me not to bother him until I finished my apprenticeship. And I know I can’t stay in Verrocchio’s workshop forever, but it’s the only place that’s felt like home for a long time.
” He slings the leather loop over his head, adjusting the fall of it just so.
“People and places get all tangled up for me. I’m not sure that makes sense. ”
A strange softness fills my chest, smothers the anger. “Feelings don’t have to make sense.” I nod to his locket. “I hope this can feel a bit like home to you, then.”
Leonardo touches the locket, peering at me from underneath his eyelashes. “I think it will.”
That look of his makes my heart thud. I let out a long, shaky breath and say the thing I meant to say at the beginning. “I’m sorry for making you think I didn’t care about your stepmother. I didn’t consider how knowing it was demons who stole her life would make you feel.”
He looks away again. “This whole time I’ve been able to imagine her in heaven, but what if I’m wrong?”
“You’re not.” Someone Leonardo loved could never be a bad person. It’s simply not possible.
He gives me a small, fragile smile. “But we can’t know.
And Lupa doesn’t either.” He shrugs at my obvious surprise.
“I believe that Lupa can’t remember anything before she came to earth.
More importantly, I don’t think she’s the problem.
The Medici are playing with darkness and passing it off as holiness.
They’re the reason my mother gave up her soul for a lie. And I think you’re right too.”
“Me?” He’s never admitted I’m right about anything.
“Yes, you.” He pokes my chest with a sly, self-assured expression that finally feels like him. “We can’t say Florence’s beloved angels are demons without proof. Do you think your brother’s disappearance and the Medici’s lies could be related? Because I think they could be.”
He’s talking so fast, it takes me a moment to catch up. Then I laugh, the sound closer to a moan.
Niccolo didn’t just know. He told me about it.
Leonardo grabs my shoulders, my answer clear on my bloodless face. “Show me.”