Thief's Cunning Read online

  “You’re rash,” she said, but once she jumped to my character faults it meant she was running out of logical arguments. “You don’t think before you act. You could do something that will get you in trouble.”

  “Who would dare stand up to me? A clipper in Lovero, during Susten? None of the other Families can enter Lilyan. They can’t reach us.”

  Lea blinked once. Then again. Her shoulders slumped slightly and I fought against smiling at my success.

  “Only for a few hours,” she said. “I want to see you back here before midnight.”

  I dashed out the door, letting it slam shut, cutting off the end of Lea’s command.

  Free. I was free to do whatever I wanted and Lea wouldn’t be around to tell me no.

  The streets were busier now that Susten was in full swing. People were singing and dancing and drinking and making merry, and their enthusiasm spread to me. But my goal wasn’t to dance in the street. My freedom wouldn’t last, so I needed to use it while I could.

  I headed west, toward Ravenna, and the answers it might hold for me.

  seven

  EVEN THOUGH THE SUN HAD SET, I WAS HOT IN MY dress with my hair draped around my shoulders and back. I tugged at my birthday scarf around my neck. Loveran women kept their hair covered or tied up and if this sort of heat was usual for them, it made sense.

  Maybe it would be cooler in Ravenna, since it was closer to the sea.

  I continued west, sometimes having to travel north or south a block or two to circumvent raucous gatherings or fenced-off courtyards, but I kept my eyes forward, even as the night seemed to fill with more and more people celebrating Safraella.

  I assumed there would be some sort of marker for entering Ravenna, but if there was, I never saw it. Instead, the crowds just kept getting thicker and thicker, pushing me more north in my journey, where the crowd eventually seemed to thin out.

  Once I reached Ravenna, I could discreetly ask around about my family, my parents. Find a church or a cleaner’s guild who might remember them.

  Finally, I pushed my way onto a street where the revelers were more sedate as they walked across the flagstones.

  The crowd seemed to break apart, and there before me stood the remains of a house.

  The house had burned down to the beams, which leaned against one another or lay collapsed on the ground, blackened. But there were no smoldering embers or ashes, no smoke or the scent of fire. This wasn’t fresh destruction but an old ruin no one had removed.

  I didn’t understand why the common would leave this ruin here as an eyesore. If people had been inside they surely would have perished.

  I swallowed and walked closer.

  Across from the ruins, where the front door of the house would’ve been, stood a marble statue of a woman. My breath caught in my throat. The statue wore leathers. A bone mask covered her face and her fists held daggers at her side. The mask was patternless, probably so it could appear to be any clipper, but it was Lea who stood before me, Oleander Saldana carved out of stone, watching over the people who walked past the ruin of her home, her Family.

  Eighteen years ago, almost to the day, this fire had been set by the Da Vias, killing the Saldanas. And the residents of Ravenna had left the destruction alone, to stare at it every day as a reminder of what had happened to the Saldanas because the Da Vias had betrayed everyone and turned to another god.

  And the statue was of Lea because though she had lost everything, she had emerged stronger with Safraella on her side.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” a voice asked me.

  I turned and found a man, handsome and tall, though not as tall as Les, with blond hair he kept cropped short.

  “It was unexpected,” I said truthfully.

  “It often is for those coming to seek it. There are always new visitors during Susten.”

  “Because of the festival?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “That, or because it’s the anniversary of Lea Saldana’s victory over the Da Vias. It was a difficult era for Ravenna, losing the Saldanas. It was a long time before the common could once more trust the Da Vias.”

  I studied him. He wore clean, well-stitched clothes. Not too rich, but certainly well-off. A ruby ring sparkled on his pinky.

  “And what about you?” I asked. “Do you trust the Da Vias?”

  He stared at the statue. “Who knows who you can really trust in this life?”

  I blinked slowly and took him in with new eyes. He had pale skin, like he didn’t see the sun often. His stance seemed lazy and relaxed, but his weight remained balanced on his feet for quick movement. And though he wore expensive jewelry, his hands were scarred.

  He was not of the common.

  I smiled, infusing my eyes with all the false friendliness I could muster. East lay my salvation, but I had no idea how far away the Lilyan and Ravenna border was, and a Da Via would surely know the streets better than a foreign girl fleeing for her life.

  He faced me then. “I think you need to come with me now.”

  He dropped his hand to his belt. It wasn’t an overtly threatening gesture but the sense of danger was still present.

  I dropped my own hand to my belt and the knife strapped there. “And how do I know if I come with you, you won’t just slit my throat?”

  “I can give you my word.”

  “Ah, but who knows who we can really trust in this life?”

  “Well, family is a good place to start, Allegra Saldana.”

  My breath caught in my throat and my blood stilled in my veins. He knew me. Knew who I was. “How do you know my name?”

  He shrugged. “Many clues. How you stare at the Saldana shrine different than all the common. The knives on your belt, your boots. Your fashion, clearly from Yvain. Mostly, though, the Family look about you. I’ve been waiting here, just in case you’d show.”

  I blinked. The Saldanas tended to be short statured, with dark, curly hair, or sometimes blond. I had the hair color, but had never been short. I didn’t really look like Emile, Marcello, or Lea, and certainly not Les. I had never fit with the Saldana Family look.

  But he had called me Saldana, not even mistaken me for a Caffarelli.

  I swallowed. “I have no Family look about me.”

  He snorted. “Of course you do. You’re just looking at the wrong Family.”

  I took a step away from him. He was speaking in riddles. “What do you know about it anyway?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. I’m Valentino Da Via. Your uncle.”

  Valentino Da Via led me deeper into Ravenna. I made sure to watch the streets as we walked past them, so I wouldn’t become more lost, and though I was sure Valentino noticed this, he didn’t say anything.

  Family. He said he was my family. My uncle. I’d stared at him for so long after this pronouncement that he’d finally laughed at me. My skin flushed and I turned away, only to be halted by his hand on my sleeve.

  He was smart. A stronger grip—his hand wrapped around my wrist or shoulder, maybe—and I would have taken it as a threat. But a few fingers on a sleeve could be easily escaped. It showed me he wouldn’t stop me if I truly wanted to flee.

  I paused. According to him I was somehow related to the Da Vias. The Da Vias were the enemy. And they were liars. But here he was, hinting at the answers I searched for. So I’d agreed to follow him in return for more answers.

  I glanced over my shoulder, but the Saldana shrine was lost from sight. I stopped. “I think that’s far enough.”

  He smiled and gestured to a restaurant ahead. “We’re just going there. Not much farther now.”

  I hadn’t eaten since that afternoon, and one more block didn’t seem like it would make much difference. I followed him the rest of the way.

  We were seated immediately on the patio at a table meant for four. The waiter poured us each a glass of wine. Valentino mumbled something in his ear and then shooed him away.

  “So, Valentino. You’re my uncle.” I twirled my wineglass. “I don’t
know if I believe you. Though we share a similar appearance.”

  “People call me Val. And you sell yourself short. You have much of the Da Via look about you. The hair. The eyes.”

  “Some of the Saldanas are blond, too, from their Caffarelli lineage.” Lea and me being the only ones.

  “How is your aunt, by the way?” He sipped his wine, trying to appear as if he didn’t truly care about my answer, but his fingers gripped the stem of the glass too tightly.

  “Fine,” I said. “Holy.”

  He snorted and then coughed on his wine. He set the glass down and dabbed at his lips.

  “Do you know her?” I asked.

  “Every clipper knows of her now, but yes, I do know her. Or did, anyway. A long time ago.”

  “Because you were enemies.”

  He examined the pattern on the tablecloth. “I suppose that was true, at the end. But before that, no, we were not enemies. I courted her and she let me. I’d hoped to marry her.”

  Lea, in a relationship with a Da Via? This Da Via before me? “I don’t believe you.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Why would I lie?”

  “Because Da Vias are liars,” I countered.

  “Lea has kept things from you.”

  I turned away, so he couldn’t see my face. If I’d had my mask, my expression would’ve remained hidden.

  “And your reaction right there,” he continued, “is how I know I’ve struck truth.”

  I ground my teeth together. He was right, of course. Because Lea kept me in the dark about so many things, I’d lost any advantage I had in this conversation. Time to regain it.

  I loosened my shoulders and relaxed. “You courted Lea. So what? It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “I guess not. But I do think those secrets of Lea’s are why you agreed to sit down with me instead of fleeing. I would have let you go, you know. I wouldn’t have chased you.”

  “So you claim.”

  He shrugged and finished his wine. A waiter poured him another glass. “Susten begins tonight, the ninth night after the midsummer new moon. A celebration of Safraella and all She does for us here in Lovero. But you’re not Loveran, so why are you really here in Ravenna? Why did you agree to come with me? What questions do you want answered? Because I can see them there, in your eyes, wanting to burst free.”

  And I did have questions. So many questions. But now that I was sitting across from a Da Via, I found my questions drying up in my throat. I latched on to the first thing that came to mind. “Did you ever marry? Have children?”

  He smirked. “Come, now. You didn’t even know who I was until I found you at the shrine. I know this isn’t what you want to speak about.”

  “Did you?”

  He shook his head. “Never found the right partner.”

  “Why did you bring me here?” I gestured to the restaurant. “We passed plenty of other places on the way, why here?”

  “Because I like their wine.”

  I didn’t believe him. There was another reason he had escorted me this far into Ravenna. The back of my neck itched.

  “You say you’re related to me.” I pictured the empty line on my family tree, leading to a mysterious common woman. “My father was a Saldana. Who was my mother?”

  Val looked at me in surprise. “You want to know what happened to her, you mean.”

  “She died in childbirth.”

  A slow smile crept over Val’s face. “Your mother, Claudia, was my sister.”

  For a moment, it seemed as if everything paused. The waiters halted midstride, the diners stopped all conversation, the breeze held its breath.

  A Da Via. My mother was a Da Via.

  No. It couldn’t be true. The Da Vias were the enemies of the Saldanas, had been so for generations. I couldn’t be a child of a Saldana and a Da Via union.

  But if Val spoke the truth, it would explain so much. It would explain why Lea refused to tell me about my parents, why they didn’t want me to travel to Lovero, where I would possibly come into contact with family.

  I looked Val in the eye. “I want to know about her.”

  “Claudia loved sweets when she was a child, the kind that make your hands stick together. Do you have something like that in Yvain?”

  I shook my head, twisting this fact over and over in my mind. Claudia. My mother had a name. Claudia. She had liked sweets as a child. It was a tiny fact, nothing really, forgettable in a lifetime of facts and emotions and experiences a person lived. But it was also huge and wonderful and brilliant and the only thing about my mother that was real, that made her seem like more than a blank space on a Family tree.

  So he claimed.

  My throat tightened, and I reached for my wine, sipping. “You were her younger brother?”

  “Yes,” he said. “When we were children, she liked to think she was in charge just because she was fifteen months older. Gods, she was insufferable. So domineering. I think it’s why she loved your father, though I never saw the appeal of their relationship. He liked to be in control, too. They were a mirror, reflecting themselves to each other.”

  Behind me waiters danced around the patio.

  “You knew my father,” I stated.

  “Some. Not so much. He died young.”

  “A lot of Saldanas died young.” At the hands of the Da Vias. “Do I . . .” I swallowed. “Do I look like her?”

  He smiled again, a more genuine smile, and nodded over my shoulder. “Why don’t you take a look yourself?”

  I spun and there behind me was not a waiter but a woman, tall, with long blond hair she had twisted around her head and a nose with a bump in the middle just like mine.

  “Oh,” she breathed, looking at me. “Allegra. I’m so happy to meet you.”

  eight

  I JUMPED TO MY FEET, THE LEGS OF THE CHAIR SCREECHING against the patio.

  “What is this?” I looked back and forth between them. “Who are you?”

  “Calm down.” The woman held her hands before her, like she was trying to ease a frantic colt or steady a rocking canal boat. But I was neither.

  I pulled my dagger from beneath my belt and held it before me. I didn’t know what this was but I wasn’t going to fall for it.

  “Oh, put the knife away.” Val finished off his wine and gestured to the waiter, who stood to the side, wide-eyed at the violence about to erupt around him.

  “What is this?” I yelled.

  “It’s fine,” the woman said, keeping her hands before her. “No one’s going to hurt you. No one’s going to do anything. We’re just here to talk.”

  “Talk about what?” I snapped, but I lowered the knife a touch. She seemed to be unarmed, and judging by how much Val was drinking, he wasn’t planning an attack anytime soon. And besides, he’d had me here the entire time and hadn’t tried anything. Of course, maybe he’d just been waiting for backup.

  “I’m Claudia Da Via,” the woman said. She dropped her hands to her sides. “Your mother.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “My mother is dead. Has been dead for eighteen years.”

  “And who told you that?” Val asked, eyes wide.

  Lea, of course. Lea had told me. My parents were dead. Emile’s parents were dead. We were orphans, but not really because we had Lea and Les and Marcello and Faraday and Beatricia. We had a Family, even if our family had been broken.

  Claudia slowly took a seat. “Why don’t you sit down again and we can talk. We can explain everything.”

  I swallowed. This wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right here. I’d spent my whole life drowning in secrets and now I felt like I was drowning in lies.

  Leave. I needed to leave. To put the Da Vias behind me. To forget all this.

  But how could I forget it if I didn’t get any answers?

  I slipped my knife beneath my belt and sat down again. But I left my chair pulled out, in case I needed a fast exit.

  I swallowed. “You can’t be her.”

  �
��Why can’t I be her?” she asked.

  “Because . . .” Because if she was my mother, it meant Lea and Les and everyone had lied to me my entire life. And maybe more important, if they had lied to me about that, what else had they lied to me about? “Because my mother died when I was born.”

  She shook her head. “No, I didn’t. I survived childbirth. I survived Lea’s attack on the Da Vias. I owe my life to my brother.”

  Val toasted himself and drank.

  “But everyone told me you were dead.”

  She shrugged. “I can’t say why they did that. Well, that’s not true. I can say, but without any real proof it would just be conjecture.”

  Val snorted. “Oh, please, Claudia.” He turned to me. “Lea lied to you because she didn’t want you to know the truth. Because she knows if you knew the truth she would lose you. And more than anything else in the whole world, Lea refuses to lose anyone.”

  “And why do you think that is?” I snapped. “Maybe because the Da Vias killed her entire Family?”

  Val shrugged but didn’t disagree.

  “Let’s pretend that you are my mother and didn’t die in childbirth,” I said, trying not to look at her. Because if I looked at her, I saw me looking back. An older me, maybe, a me with lines where I didn’t have them, but a me nonetheless. “When your Family murdered my father with the rest of the Da Vias, you never thought to reach out to me? To find me? You just abandoned me?”

  Val laughed until Claudia shot him a venomous look.

  “I spent years looking for you,” Claudia, my supposed mother, said. Something flashed in her eyes, dark and menacing, and I was reminded, forcefully, that she was a clipper, too. That she could be deadly. “Countless trips to Yvain and Rennes, searching for you, or a sign of any of the Saldanas. I was alone, though. Our Family head told the others to stay out of it since Lea was chosen by Safraella. And Lea knew how to cover her tracks. Knew what she’d done.”

  “What had she done?” Claudia’s tale seemed vague and unspecific. Anyone could say they searched for someone, but who could say whether it was true or not?