Masks

Chapter Twenty-Five

“No. With Auria.”

Mircea turned, halfway up the landing. He was filthy, his hair still dripping with sooty canal water, his velvet clothes a sodden ruin. A livid burn cut across the fingers of his right hand that he couldn’t recall getting, but which must have happened in the split second before he dove, when he raised his hand to shield his face.

He was also starved, exhausted, and hurting, in more ways than one.

And yet Martina stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up at him impatiently.

“Not tonight,” he said harshly.

“Yes, tonight. What if she calls for you tomorrow?”

“And I thought you said she wasn’t interested.”

Mircea didn’t bother to keep the contempt out of his voice, and Martina flushed angrily. But Paulo stepped forward before she could respond. “Perhaps tomorrow would be better,” he murmured. “We’ve all had a shock. Sanuito—”

“Is dead,” Martina said bluntly. “Fortunately for him.”

“Fortunately . . .” Mircea stared at her.

“It was quick. If he’d survived, the Watch wouldn’t have been so kind. He caused a fortune’s worth of damage, disrupted the entire spectacle—”

“It was only a parade—”

“No, it was half a parade. The rest is probably still burning. How anyone didn’t get killed—”

“Someone did!”

“Yes, someone did. And now it’s over. As long as the Watch doesn’t find out who else was involved.”

The threat was palpable. So was Mircea’s disgust as he pushed past her, back into the hall. Only to be brought up short.

But not by Martina.

“No.” The voice was soft, and it took him a moment to realize who was speaking. The small entryway was crowded with returning revelers and servants busy helping them out of their cloaks. But everyone suddenly paused to look back—at Auria, standing alone by the front door.

Martina came slowly through the crowd. “What did you say?”

“I said it can wait.”

“It can’t—”

“And I say it will have to.” There was a tone in Auria’s voice Mircea hadn’t heard before. Instead of the usual throaty contralto, it was shrill, almost brittle, and shook slightly, like the hand still gripping the throat of her cloak.

“If this is because of some animosity between the two of you—”

“No. This is because a man died tonight!” Auria spat, and fled.

No one else moved, servants and masters alike frozen in a tableau so still it might have been a painting labelled “shock.” Except for Mircea. Who pushed past the others and followed the running girl down the hall.

He couldn’t imagine where she was going. The finest bedrooms of the house were located on the piano nobile, the floor above ground level, as was common in Venice. Upper floors had better views, and avoided the dampness and odors of street level. Marte, Martina, and Paulo all had their rooms there, along with the more elegant reception rooms and the dining hall. Danieli, Zaneta, and most of the rest of the household were housed on the floor immediately above that, in smaller, but still fine rooms, with balconies to make them feel bigger.

Mircea’s own bedroom was in the warren of small attic rooms on the top floor, used by the servants. It did not have a balcony. Or much of anything else, except a roof that sloped sharply enough to insure that he regularly hit his head when getting up in the morning.

It had never occurred to him to wonder where Auria slept. But he wouldn’t have assumed that it was on the work-like street floor. Other than for the small salon used for tradesmen, where they’d met the tailor, it mostly contained workrooms—kitchen, pantry, a study where Paulo wrestled with the accounts . . .

And, he discovered as he neared the end of the hall, a bedroom easily twice as large as Marte’s, and far more opulent.

Mircea paused for a moment in the doorway, staring at what looked less like a room and more like a treasure chest.

Frescoes of wooded glades peeked out from between tapestries of Mars and Venus. Fine cambrai cloth framed a four-poster bed with exquisite carvings. A painted and gilt casket on a table overflowed with pearls. Ivory fans and ebony combs were scattered carelessly here and there on more tables, some covered with exquisite Turkish carpets, along with belts set with gold and gemstones. And alabaster bottles filled with perfumes. And stockings and slippers of silk and velvet. And vases, and cameos, and an ostrich egg decorated all over with pictures of birds . . .

And those were just the things in view. Numerous chests, coffers, and the strongboxes the Venetians called forziere lined the walls of what Mircea assumed was once a storeroom, since some of the chests were set into purpose-built niches. And held what were presumably more gifts from grateful clients.

Not that the abundance seemed to be making its owner very happy.

Auria was sitting at a small table, putting a beautiful strand of coral beads into a box. At least, she was until it snagged on a corner, and she jerked it hard enough to break the string and send the beads flying. The coffer followed, as she swept it off the table with a cry, sending it tumbling across the tiled floor and spilling a line of glittering contents halfway across the room.

She didn’t go after them.

She sat there, her head in her hands, visibly shaking. Until Mircea took a tentative step forward. Then she looked up, the pale cheeks flushing with anger.

“I already told Martina, not tonight!”

“I’m not here for Martina,” he said, crossing the room and going to one knee in front of her. It put them on a level, allowing him to see her face through the dim moonlight filtering through a single, multipaned window. Judging by the puffy and bloodshot eyes, she had been crying silently behind the mask she’d just removed. Probably all the way back.

“Then why are you here?” she demanded shrilly.

“To see how you were.”

“Well, you’ve seen!” She got up in a sweep of skirts, only to kneel a moment later, to collect the scattered beads. But her hands were shaking and she dropped almost as many as she picked up. Considering how graceful her actions usually were, that told him more than the previous outburst about her state of mind.

Like when she suddenly threw them across the floor, scattering the rest of the strand. And then brought her wrists up to her face, a sound halfway between a sob and a curse emanating from behind them. “Auria—” Mircea said quietly.

“Get out!”

“No.”

“No?” She looked back at him, confusion and anger on her lovely face. “You dare—”

“Yes, I dare.” He tried to help her up, but she slapped his hand away.

“The arrogance of the prince!” she spat. “I suppose it’s hard to learn to take orders, after growing up in a palace!”

“I didn’t grow up in a palace.”

“Compared to where I did? Compared to where Sanuito did?” She laughed, and it was ugly. “Yes, a palace!”

“Perhaps. But we’re all the same now.”

“The same? We’ll never be the same! If you spend the rest of your life a slave, it won’t make us the same! You can’t know—”

She broke off, turning her face away. And tried to get up. But her heel caught on the edge of her gown, and she sat down on the tile rather abruptly.

And then just stayed there, staring at her hands.

And then up at him, looking strangely lost.

The antimony she’d used to outline her eyes had run, leaving what looked like dirty tracks down her face. Her lipstick was smeared; her hair in unusual disarray. But it was the eyes that caught him, large and dark and haunted.

“You can’t know,” she said again.

“Then tell me.”

She laid her head back against the carved front of a chest at the end of the bed. And stared at the boards of the ceiling above. Where the frescoed decadence of the walls gave way to the more rustic, bare bones look of the old storeroom.

“You wouldn’t understand if I did.”

Mircea looked around. There were two folding chairs under the window, but she didn’t look like she felt like moving. And neither did he.

He hadn’t fed in hours, and the small reserve he’d had had been expended on the chase. He was so tired, even the floor felt like goose down as he settled in front of her, in the small puddle he’d already managed to shed and didn’t care about since he couldn’t get any wetter. She didn’t object.

“Wouldn’t understand what?” he asked softly.

She shut her eyes. “What it’s like to be powerless. Truly powerless.”

“I think I know everything about that,” he said, thinking back over the last two years.

But Auria was shaking her head. “You know nothing about it. And if you live to be as old as that senator of yours, you’ll never really understand it. For that, you have to grow up with nothing. You have to be hungry most of the time and anxious all the time, never knowing where your next meal is coming from. Or if you’ll have a roof over your head tomorrow. You have to wear rags that get smaller as you grow because you can’t replace them, to the point that men start accosting you in the street, mistaking you for . . . something you’re not. Not then, at least. You have to have your mother sell you anyway, to the first one who offers to pay. You have to run away, and discover that it doesn’t matter, that they just drag you back, and make you . . .”

She cut off and they sat there, silently, for a long moment. Mircea wanted to say something to take that haunted look off her face. But he somehow knew it would only make things worse.

She didn’t need platitudes; she needed to be heard.

So he sat there. And dripped onto her floor. And listened.

She wrapped her arms around her knees, and then laid her head on them, looking suddenly childlike. “Do you know who Sanuito was, before he met you?” she asked, after a while.

“Bezio thinks he might have been a soldier. That he’d been traumatized in battle at some point, and that was why—”

Auria shook her head. “He was never in battle. He was never much of anything before they found him, his old ‘master,’ and that creature. You heard about the bet?”

Mircea nodded.

“That’s why they chose him. Sanuito was nobody, would be missed by nobody. He’d never been anybody, born to a whore, raised as a cut purse. At least until the smallpox, which left him too scarred to be forgettable and too weak to run away. Or to gain employment from people who only wanted strong backs. But alms, too, are hard to come by unless you’re young and attractive or old and crippled, and he was neither. Just hungry and desperate, with no one to turn to. Until he met you.”

“I didn’t do anything for him,” Mircea said harshly. Except watch him die.

She smiled wryly. “Oh, no. Nothing. Other than standing up to a room full of the Watch and Martina’s demands, with no weapons and no leverage—not even any clothes! He told me about that, in something like awe. Said he wouldn’t have done the same for you. Wouldn’t have even done it for himself.”

“I think he might have been wrong about—”

“You think that, yes!” Blue eyes flew open. “Because that’s what you would do. What you were trained to do—to stand up for yourself, to take control, to lead. We don’t think like that, Sanuito and me. Life’s taught us to keep our heads down, to stay out of trouble, to avoid making a fuss. He told me he was too afraid to move that night, like I was when—” She broke off abruptly.

And then got up and began putting her jewels back in their case.

“Like I was tonight,” she finished.

“There was nothing you could have done, Auria.”

He’d meant it to be comforting, but it seemed to have the opposite effect.

“Nothing?” She rounded on him. “I’m a century older than you! And I’m faster. Stronger. More resilient to all that fire that was being flung around. I might even have caught him! But we’ll never know now, will we? If I’d had time to think—”

She broke off, and threw the last of the precious items back into the cask. “But you didn’t need it, did you? You didn’t have to think about it.”

“There was no time, and I didn’t know what he might do—”

“No, you didn’t.” She stopped to look at him. “That’s my point, Mircea! You didn’t know what he might do, yet you went anyway. Immediately. While the rest of us stood around gaping: passive, accepting, useless. Oh, shocked, yes; horrified even. But we did nothing. Except watch the great lord go charging after him—”

“Followed closely by the blacksmith,” Mircea pointed out.

“That doesn’t count.” She brushed it away. “Bezio jumped because you did. He would have followed you into hell if you’d asked him. They all would, him, Jerome, even Sanuito. . . .”

She made a sound between disgust and distress, and got to her feet, putting the jewel cask back in place. “I’m sick of this, of being helpless. I’ve been sick of it for . . . as long as I can remember. I always thought, when I got older, when I gained power, that it would be different. That I would be different. But then tonight . . . I may be weak by vampire standards, but I had enough power to save him. I had enough to do that! And I didn’t use it. I didn’t do anything.”

Mircea watched her for a moment, torn. But he couldn’t allow her to believe something that wasn’t true. That was, in fact, pretty much the opposite of the truth.

“You were shocked and frightened, Auria,” he finally said. “And had never been trained to react in a crisis. Of course you hesitated. If I’d had more time to think about it, I . . . might have acted the same.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You should,” he said bitterly. “Sanuito had a lead, and with the thickness of the crowd and my power level—I should have known I wouldn’t catch him. I should have stayed put. Should have remembered . . .”

“What?”

“That I’m not that man anymore!” he said angrily, gazing up at her.

She returned the look for a moment, through a fall of auburn hair. And then she squatted in front of him in a pool of velvet, dignity forgotten. “What man?”

He waved a hand, suddenly too tired to think up the words for all that he had been, or was supposed to have been: the heir that secured his father’s dynasty, the hedge for his people against the Turks, the husband of a loving woman, maybe someday the father. . . .

Too many things to count.

All of which he’d managed to disappoint.

Like he had Sanuito, tonight.

“The man you described,” he said wearily. “The one trained to lead. You were right; I was trained—from birth. But now . . .”

She cocked her head, watching him. “But now? What happened?”

“You know what happened,” he said, lip curling in disgust. “This—” He waved a hand again, this time at himself.

“You mean the Change? Do you really think that matters?”

He stared at her. “Of course it matters!”

“Does it? In our world, you’re an infant, barely two years old. If you were in a normal family, you wouldn’t even be let out of the house at your age. Much less be jumping through fiery hoops and diving into canals and almost getting blown up. Yet you did it, without a thought. Just as I . . . stood there.

“Power is more than strength, Mircea. It takes more than that to be a leader. More of . . . whatever it is you have, and I don’t.”

“I think you underestimate yourself.”

“And I think you would have done the same thing tonight, if you’d had a year to think about it. It’s in the moments when we don’t have time to think, that we show who we really are.”

She laughed suddenly, and it looked strange, considering the tears still glistening on her cheeks. “Sanuito told me you were the strangest man he ever met. And I can’t say he was wrong, Mircea Basarab. But don’t blame the Change for that!”