Chapter TEN
Aurelio
The harvest blessing falls three days after the wedding, the timing entirely unplanned and entirely, I find myself thinking more than once that morning, exactly right — the first major ritual of my reign that I'll preside over as a married man,
and the first time in eleven years I've looked forward to the ceremony rather than simply performing it.
I wake early, before the household stirs, and find myself standing at my bedroom window watching the mist still clinging to the lower groves, burning off slowly as the sun climbs over the Ionian Sea to the east.
This ritual has marked every September of my life — I have memories of it stretching back further than I have memories of almost anything else, my father's hand on my shoulder guiding me through the first row of trees at four or five years old,
too young to understand the words but old enough to feel the particular hush that falls over an entire household when something old is being honored rather than merely performed.
Standing at the window, I think of how many Bruzzano brides have walked this same procession before Ortensia, how many of them married into a legitimacy I am only now beginning to suspect was never as clean as the ritual itself pretends, and I find the thought sitting uneasily beside the simple,
uncomplicated happiness of knowing she'll be beside me for it this year.
The bergamot groves stretch down the hillside below the palazzo in long, orderly rows, the trees heavy with fruit not yet ready for harvest but close enough that the air carries their particular sharp,
citrus sweetness even from the terrace where the family gathers each year to bless the season ahead.
It's a small ritual, older than anyone currently living, predating even the earliest portrait in the gallery — a priest, a procession through the first row of trees,
a blessing spoken in the old dialect that's survived in this one specific ceremony longer than almost anywhere else in the family's practice, and afterward, a long table set under the trees themselves, the entire household and half the allied families along the coast gathered for a meal that runs,
by tradition, well into the evening.
Ortensia stands beside me through the procession, dressed in something Adelina herself selected — a quiet concession from my grandmother that surprised me more than I let show,
given how carefully she's guarded every detail of this house since before I was born — and I watch her take in the ritual with the same careful, professional attention she brings to everything, cataloging the dialect, the gestures, a familiar weight of tradition repeated unbroken across generations.
"You're memorizing this," I murmur to her, as Padre Eustachio's voice carries through the first row of trees, the old words rising and falling in a rhythm I've heard every September of my life.
"I'm a conservator, signore. Memorizing things is the entire job."
She doesn't look at me, her attention fixed on the priest, on the procession, but something at the corner of her mouth suggests she's not entirely displeased by my noticing.
"Besides. If I'm going to be married into this family, I'd like to understand what I've actually married into, beyond the parts that involve being collected like a debt."
I don't have a ready answer for that, and find I don't need one — the ritual itself fills the silence, the blessing concluding as it always does with the priest pressing a sprig of bergamot blossom into the hands of every person present, a small,
fragrant token meant to carry the season's promise through the months ahead.
Ortensia accepts hers with the same careful attention she's given everything else, turning it over in her fingers, and I watch her notice, the way she notices everything, the small embroidered detail on the ribbon binding it — a crown, stitched in gold thread,
the same crown from the family crest that hangs above the palazzo's main entrance.
"Every blessing token carries the crest," I tell her, before she asks. "Since before anyone alive remembers why. My grandmother would know the origin better than I do."
"I'd like to ask her, sometime. If she's willing."
The dinner that follows is the part of this ritual I've always found easy, despite everything else about ruling this mountain that requires constant, careful discipline — long tables set under the bergamot trees, candles in glass storm-lanterns swaying gently in the evening breeze,
Pina and the kitchen staff moving between courses with the practiced rhythm of a meal they've prepared every September for decades.
The food arrives in the old way, family-style, platters of grilled fish caught that morning off the Locri coast, stewed goat with peppers and wild fennel, bread torn rather than sliced, the strong dark wine of the hill villages poured generously and refilled without anyone needing to ask.
Donato sits across from us, more relaxed than I've seen him in days, trading easy banter with Costanzo about a fishing dispute neither of them actually cares about, and even Marzio, present by tradition rather than invitation, seems to have set aside, for one evening at least,
the cold calculation he brought to the chapel three nights ago.
"Your wife asked Pina for the recipe for the goat stew," Donato says at one point, leaning across the table with the particular delight of a younger brother who's found something interesting to report.
"Pina hasn't given that recipe to anyone outside the kitchen staff in thirty years. She gave it to Ortensia within an hour of being asked."
"She has good instincts about people," I say, watching Ortensia further down the table, deep in conversation with my grandmother, her hands moving as she describes something — gesso, I'd guess, from the shape of the gesture, the particular careful motion of laying down thin, even layers.
"She has rather more than instincts, brother."
Donato's voice has dropped, more serious now, though the easy warmth hasn't altogether left it.
"I watched her stand in that chapel three nights ago and tell twelve armed men exactly why she was choosing to stay, with more composure than half the men in this family manage under a tenth the pressure. Whatever I said in the gun room before the wedding — I'll admit it plainly,
now that I've seen her properly. I was wrong to doubt the speed of it. I'm not wrong to keep watching how it unfolds. But I was wrong about her."
Adelina sits at the head of the second table, the position she's held at every harvest blessing since my grandfather's death, and I watch her, throughout the meal, in conversation with Ortensia — careful at first, the polite distance of two women who've known each other only days, but warming,
gradually, into something that looks, from where I'm sitting, almost like genuine ease.
I catch fragments of it as the courses pass — Adelina describing the groves as they were sixty years ago, before the worst of the postwar replanting, a raw variety of bergamot her own grandmother insisted on preserving even when easier hybrids became available,
Ortensia asking technical questions about soil and rootstock with the same precise curiosity she brings to four-hundred-year-old gesso, and somewhere in the middle of it, unexpectedly, both of them laughing at something I don't catch,
my grandmother's hand briefly resting on Ortensia's arm with a warmth I haven't seen her extend to anyone outside this family in longer than I can remember.
"She likes her," Costanzo murmurs beside me, following my gaze. ", I think. Not the careful performance she usually manages for guests."
"I'd noticed."
"It's a strange thing to watch, isn't it. Knowing what we both suspect about what your grandmother's been protecting all these years."
Costanzo's voice has dropped lower, careful even here, even surrounded by the easy noise of a family dinner.
"Either she's a good deal better actress than either of us has given her credit for in seventeen years of watching her, or there's something more complicated happening in that woman's heart than simple guilt over an old crime."
"I keep coming back to the same thought," I say, turning my wine glass slowly in my hand, watching the candlelight catch in it.
"She handed me a crown eleven years ago and told me some crowns are heavier than the men who wear them. I assumed, at eighteen, that she meant the ordinary weight of rule — the decisions, the violence, the responsibility for every man under this name.
I'm starting to think she meant something far more specific. That she's been carrying a particular weight herself, alone, for longer than either of us has been alive to notice,
and that watching me marry into the very mystery she's been guarding is the first time in eleven years she's allowed herself to imagine setting any part of it down."
"You think she wants the truth to come out."
"I think," I say slowly, working through the thought as I speak it, "that she's spent her whole life believing loyalty to this family meant silence, and that some part of her — watching Ortensia tonight,
watching the way she handled twelve armed men with more honesty than most of those men manage with each other — is finally starting to wonder whether silence was ever actually the loyal choice at all."
I watch my grandmother laugh again at something Ortensia says, watch the genuine warmth in her face, and I think of the chapel, of her quiet fear when I told her about the diocesan seal, of her words in the gallery — some debts cannot be settled by an object alone,
they require a witness who still remembers what was actually owed.
I do not yet understand what she meant. I am beginning, watching her with Ortensia tonight, to suspect that whatever she's been carrying, it is not the simple, calculated guilt of a woman protecting a family secret for the sake of power alone.
"Tell me honestly," I say to Costanzo, low enough that no one else at the table catches it.