“So she deals with that by giving him what he wants?” Jerome demanded.
“What’s the alternative? Let him keep attacking her, whittling down her supporters until—”
“No, but she could have . . . gone on the offensive. Ordered an assassination—”
“Isn’t that what someone just tried?” Mircea asked.
Jerome frowned. “I’m just pointing out that there must have been a better way.”
Maybe there was, but Mircea didn’t see it. And, frankly, he agreed with the senator. If he was going to go out, it would be fighting.
Not waiting around for an execution.
It looked like the servant’s gossip had been right, after all. A coup had been planned for this convocation. But it had been the consul behind it.
He’d planned to take out a child who was growing over powerful, and given the statue Mircea had seen in her garden, possibly overproud. Or perhaps that had been her subtle way of hinting to her master: you have to follow the law, like everyone else, or there are forces that will make you. Perhaps she thought the warning would be enough, that he wouldn’t risk this.
If so, she’d thought wrong.
It was the clash of two titans: the consul refusing to be curbed by his own child, and steadily growing more and more erratic. The senator growing simultaneously more and more dissatisfied under his rule, chafing beneath the yoke of a tyrant. It had to come to a head sooner or later, and he had decided to act first.
Mircea didn’t know if he’d planned that insult at the regatta, mentally controlling the man who had pulled down his banner, or if he’d taken advantage of a chance opportunity. But killing that many of any master’s family was virtually sure to provoke a reaction. He must have had people watching the masters involved, waiting for them to do something stupid.
Which of course they had.
Mircea felt like throttling both of them. How could they be so old, and not know how the game was played? This was politics, plain and simple. The same maneuvering, conniving, and backstabbing he’d grown up with and hated with a passion. And if he could read the signs, why couldn’t they?
As it was, to avenge those they couldn’t bring back, they’d put their lady’s life in danger. Because Mircea agreed with Jerome: if she thought she could win, she would have challenged before now. She might have used the possibility of it for years, as a way of curbing some of his excesses, but he didn’t think she’d actually planned to do it. Not now; not yet.
But thanks to the consul’s maneuvering—or his good friend Hassani’s more like—she now had no choice.
He is going to kill her, Mircea thought, his fist clenching.
And there wasn’t a goddamned thing anyone could do about it.
“Well, I think she should have swallowed the insult,” Jerome said. “Challenging him only makes things worse.”
“Maybe,” Bezio said. “But it doesn’t matter anyway—”
“Doesn’t matter?” Jerome said incredulously. “How do you figure that?”
“I meant, it doesn’t matter to us. This is high politics. It isn’t the sort of thing we have any business being concerned with.”
“I’ll be concerned with what I like,” Jerome said. “And you should be, too. Do you want to have that creature in charge of us?”
“It’s more likely to be Hassani in charge,” Mircea put in. “He seems to be running things already.”
“My point stands,” Jerome said. “How much do you think Hassani will care what happens to us? He doesn’t have to live here. And you can be damned sure he’ll be more interested in using us to serve his needs than in proper governance.”
“Proper governance,” Bezio scoffed. “There’s no such thing. There’s the bastards and then there’s us, and you try to keep your head down and hope they don’t notice you. It’s the same no matter who sits in the big chair. And it always will be.”
Jerome opened his mouth to reply, but by then they’d arrived at the rundown tavern the cook had talked about. They paused outside the door, or what would have been the door if it had had one. A tattered curtain had to do the job instead, since there was no room to swing anything out into the tiny excuse for an alley.
“Stinks like magic,” Bezio grumbled.
If magic smelled like body odor, alcohol, lightning, and strange herbs burnt over a fire, Mircea agreed.
“There’s still time to turn back,” Jerome said, eyeing the ominous emblem set into the bricks over the door.
Most Venetian shops had symbols over or beside the entrance, as a way of identifying themselves to illiterate customers. They were usually cheerful things, designed to be attractive and easy to remember: sun, moon and stars; stylized mythological beasts; plants and animals. It was common to give directions by telling a servant to pick something up at the sign of the galloping gryphon, or beside the leaping lizard or near the merry maiden.
This was none of the above. Just a jumble of intricate, foreign symbols that seemed to squirm and twist and change as Mircea looked at them. They felt less like a welcome than a warning, and made turning around even more tempting than it had already been.
And it had been tempting enough.
Mircea had an extremely limited acquaintance with magic, mostly involving the woman who had cursed him over one of his father’s peccadillos. Considering how well that had gone, he had made a habit to actively avoid it ever since. But tomorrow convocation ended and they were leaving Venice. If he wanted to find out what had happened to Sanuito this was his last chance.
And he did want to know.
Because Bezio was right. As much as he sympathized with the senator’s dilemma, Mircea couldn’t do much about the schemes and plots, treacheries and betrayals of the ruling class. But maybe he could do something to avenge Sanuito.
Or at least he could try.
“Come on,” he told them, and they went inside.
Inside wasn’t much bigger than outside, just a small, dark, oddly-shaped room lit mainly by the red glow from a fireplace. The ceiling was low, and either it was sagging or it had been built slightly off kilter to begin with, because the part farthest away from the fire was a good two feet lower than the rest. Which probably explained why it boasted an open table.
They took it, crowding together onto a single bench with the wall at their backs. Mircea stopped breathing, in order to help with the smell, but poor Jerome didn’t have that ability and was looking fairly revolted. And that was before a man came over carrying three tankards they hadn’t asked for, and that cost a small fortune Mircea didn’t have.
Jerome paid, with his sour expression tipping into a scowl, and Mircea enquired after Hieronimo.
The barman said something in a language none of them understood, or could even identify, and shuffled off. Leaving them looking at each other. And then at the expensive contents of their tankards.
“I think it’s vinegar,” Jerome said, sniffing it. And then he put his tankard back down with the air of a man who did not intend to pick it up again.
Bezio eyed it unhappily, but after a moment, he manned up and tried a small sip.
“Well?” Mircea asked.
“I . . . think I could actually taste that,” Bezio told him, in wonder.
“How was it?”
“I’m not sure. But I think I might have just found your poison.”
They mostly sat and looked at their tankards after that.
Long minutes went by.
There was a creeping chill from the doorway that occasionally fluttered the curtain and painted a cold line right up Mircea’s spine. Or maybe that was something else. Like the fact that nobody had said a word since they came in.