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“Shhh.”
I put a hand on Ray’s arm and he quieted.
“It is not my house,” I repeated. “And the people who live in it are not my friends. I see the fey sometimes—the honor guard to the princess?”
He nodded. It was a strange fact that my twin’s best friend had married a fey prince, and was thus a princess, but we had both grown used to it. What I had not grown used to was her bodyguards. Her father-in-law, the fey king Caedmon, had supplied them, and they did not like me.
“They like you,” Ray protested.
“They like Dory,” I corrected. “Not at first, but I think they have changed their minds. Yet they watch her, nonetheless, or rather, they watch for me. To see if the monster is going to emerge.”
“You are not a monster.”
“No, but I am an unknown, with power they cannot always counter, and thus a threat. I do not blame them; it is their job. But the fact remains, they are not my friends.”
“I’m your friend.”
I rolled my head over to look at him. “I would like to think so. B
ut if so, you will be the first in a very long time.”
I heard childish laughter, from long ago, and it was so real that I started slightly. I remembered too much, and too well; it was both a blessing and a curse. I wondered which this was, as faces appeared in my mental eye that I had not thought about in years, but who had lived on the same street in Venice with me when I was a girl.
There was pudgy Luysio, who used to distract the candy vendors, so that I could steal a morsel for us both; here was pretty Gerita, with her flashing dark eyes and bouncing curls, who was such a good dancer that people would pay to watch her; over there was Rigi with his wooden sword, who had learned how to fight from a great uncle and then taught the whole street; here was tiny blonde Coletta, who liked to feed the birds . . .
“Woah, who are they?” Ray asked, because he could see them, too. I could have closed my mind to him, but I didn’t. I did the opposite, because I wanted him to understand.
And, suddenly, we were back there, my memory perfectly recreating the scene: red bricks and crumbling stucco buildings bordering dusty streets with narrow walkways, because you had to make room for the canals; pigeons nesting in ancient statue’s crowns, dripping droppings down the proud features of some Very Important Person who nobody remembered the name of anymore; heat shimmering off the marble facades of the wealthy, the shiny black paint on the gondolas, and the awed, sweaty faces of the tourists, and darkening the clothes of the beggars with lame legs who got up and walked home at the end of the day.
“Shit!” Ray said, gazing around.
I supposed this wasn’t what he’d meant by images.
“No, it’s just—I just—wow,” he said, and I smiled.
Venice was indeed overwhelming. There were the scents: spices and dirt, unwashed bodies and exotic perfumes, but most of all the ever-present smell of the sea and the things that came from it, the latter of which the city’s fleet of fishing boats brought back every day to sizzle in peddler’s carts and drive the street dogs wild. There were the people, from literally every corner of the Earth: glittering ladies tottering about on platform shoes, their attendants following them like a flock of twittering birds; harried men, grasping at their hips for swords they weren’t allowed to wear here; foreign merchants with their robes and turbans and troops of slaves; dirty, olive skinned children running underfoot in droves and pickpocketing you if you weren’t careful. And, finally, there were the colors: a city of white sails and blue-green water and black smoke from the kilns at Murano, and huge skies in a whole palette of shades, and towering mountains of clouds that painters came from all over Europe to set down for posterity, but that we saw every day.
“Wow,” Ray said again, sounding awed.
“You were never here?” I asked.
“No, and I kinda think I missed out.”
I smiled, glad to be able to show him this.
“What is this, exactly?” he asked.
“We are on the way to one of the battagliola, one of the street battles fought with sticks,” I informed him. “There were few chivalric tournaments in Venice, there being little room for the horses, so street fights took their place. Even better, you did not have to be a knight or some wealthy man’s son to take part. There was no armor to buy, just wooden weapons and leather shields, which almost anyone could afford. Whole neighborhoods used to join in, or all the members of a single guild. It was like a sport, you see?”
Ray nodded, perhaps because he was seeing it, through my eyes.
“We found a spot with a good view,” I continued, taking him to where I’d been that day, high above the teeming street.
We suddenly reappeared on a rooftop—perhaps a little too close to the edge. He abruptly stepped back. “Hey! A little warning next time!”
“Sorry.” I grinned at him, and he shook his head.
“Everybody in this damn family is crazy,” he muttered, but he did return to the edge after a moment, to gaze downward.
