Page 74 of Play of Shadows
‘Perhaps, but now it’s been played by a Bardatti.’
Smiling, she took my hand, then reached for Beretto’s and ledus towards the rehearsal hall. ‘Come, my pretties. You owe me a meal and something to drink. And then the three of us will discuss how we’re going to save the country.’
Chapter 36
The Congretto
Buying a simple meal proved more challenging than any of us had anticipated. The entire city was buzzing with talk of the Operato Belleza’s shocking new historia, to say nothing of its outrageous and possibly treasonous lead actor. Over the past year, I’d grown accustomed to being derided as ‘the Rabbit’, the cowardly fugitive who’d fled an honour duel to hide behind the walls of the Belleza like a frightened child burying himself beneath his mother’s skirts. After tonight’s performance, however, my long-overdue fight with the Vixen seemed to have been forgotten. Now people referred to me as ‘the Veristor’ and spoke in hushed tones of the man who’d conjured the notorious Corbier back from the dead to wreak vengeance upon the living.
None of which actually improved my reputation.
The moment I stepped outside the Belleza, someone started shouting, ‘There he goes, the Red-Eyed Raven himself!’ Every time I tried to squeeze my way into a tavern to buy a beer, I was accosted by some drunk grabbing at my shoulder and shouting in my ear, ‘Come on, your Grace, surely you can afford to stand your faithful subjects a drink?’
Beretto invariably slammed the drunk’s head down on the bar, while Rhyleis disarmed the fellow’s enraged compatriots with ajoke so ribald even the hardest-hearted among them collapsed in riotous laughter, and the three of us made our escape– and sadly, without any beer.
But it was those whodidn’tcajole or curse who were troubling me the most: grim-faced men huddled in corners, eyeing me as they whispered to their comrades. Far too many of them wore iron emblems pinned to their collars.
‘What I don’t understand,’ Beretto began afterfinallytaking a break from singing outrageously bawdy songs with Rhyleis– the two of them had bonded over a shared love and encyclopaedic knowledge of what they gigglingly referred to asthe sublime poetry of the perverse– ‘is how you could have seen those brooches on Pierzi’s lieutenants a century in the past, when the Orchids only appeared a few years ago.’
‘This time,’ Rhyleis said, absently shaking the near-empty wineskin she and Beretto had snatched from the last tavern we’d fled.
‘What do you mean, “thistime”?’
The Bardatti hummed softly to herself, then paused to drain the skin dry before launching into a hauntingly intricate lament.
‘No crown, no sceptre, howe’re brightly they shine,
Gainsay our rights, as holy as thine.
Thy pertine is comely, o’er the garden it looms,
But gaze all around you, at sturdier blooms.
A Court of Flowers rises up,
Petals unfold,
Their stems are steel,
All covered in gold.
So go thou gently, oh prince.
Cease your roaring, oh Lion,
Else the morrow may find you,
Crowned with orchids of iron.’
‘Pretty melody,’ Beretto said. ‘What’s it called?’
‘No one knows for sure; only that one fragment remains.’ She nodded to me. ‘I’d forgotten it myself until last night’s stroll along that cesspit canal beneath the Ponta Mervigli. I believe it’s an old dolacrimo– afuneral song.’
My chest clenched as if a cord tied around my heart was being pulled tight. It wasn’t pain, exactly, more of an unexpected burst of. . .irritation?
‘Are all Bardatti so musically illiterate?’ I asked, taken aback by the venom in my own voice, ‘or are you one of the especially stupid ones?’
Did I just—?
