Kushiel's Chosen - Jacqueline Carey [131]
It was Joscelin, oddly enough, who took the prophecy most seriously; though not so odd, when I thought on it. After all, he had been a priest himself, and would be still, were it not for me. "What you seek, you will find," he murmured, glancing at me. "Blessed Elua grant it is so, since you're damnably single-minded about it. I never thought you'd desist, no matter what I argued." Propped his chin in his hands, he gazed at the lamp in the center of the table, its flickering light casting his face into shadow and making a mask of it. "Prophecy is a dangerous thing. But I'll say naught to dissuade you, for now."
"Thank you," I said simply.
We left it at that, for the evening. If nothing else, Joscelin's words had lent the prospect of believability to our quest, and I was grateful for that, although I did not know how far I could count on his aid. We had declared a peace by default, and I was glad he had returned, but our harsh words earlier lay like a sword between us, and neither of us willing to take it up or cast it aside.
In the days that followed, I came to see a great deal of La Serenissima and became accepted into the society of Severio's peers. A season of truce-parties had begun, where young gallants of all the Sestieri's clubs held extravagant fetes, and no quarreling was allowed on the host's estate. Strange affairs, to a D'Angeline mind, where the young men gathered to discuss politics and the women to discuss romance and fashion, under the watchful eyes of a half-dozen chaperones. Married women had some freedom; maidens had little. More often than not, I was bored, except when there was dancing and entertainment. When the fête dwindled to a close, the revelers would straggle homeward in torchlit processions—and there the truce ended. Any gallant escorting his lady's party was reckoned safe from harm, but unaccompanied clubsmen set upon each other in the sort of gleeful skirmishes I'd witnessed in the Square.
It goes without saying that a great deal of matchmaking went on at these truce-parties.
For his part, Severio displayed me like a jewel, and his pride in it was nearly enough to offset his impatient desire. The gallant sons of the Hundred Worthy Families, sporting the colors of a host of vividly-named clubs—Perpetui, Ortolani, Fraterni, Semprevivi, Floridi—flocked to me like bees to honey, and I was glad of the Immortali's zealous protectiveness, both for my person and my reputation. The young women of La Serenissima treated me with a certain jealous awe, and if I made no friends among them, at least they were wary of maligning me where the Doge's grandson might get wind of it. Most of them, I was shocked to learn, were illiterate. Only priestesses and a few rare noblewomen learned to read and write.
Although I must say, they did know how to cipher. A shrewd mind for trade was reckoned an asset in a wife. Giulia Latrigan, whose uncle was one of the richest men in La Serenissima and stood as the likely candidate for Sestieri d'Oro, could add and deduct whole lists of figures in her head in the blink of an eye. She was clever and funny, and among all the young women, kindly disposed toward me; I think we might have been friends, if not for the rivalry between her family and the Stregazza. But there was talk ofan engagement between Giulia and a son of the Cornaldo family, who held great sway among the Consiglio Maggiore, and Severio said bitterly in private that Tomaso Cornaldo would take six votes with him if the rumors regarding the size of Giulia's dowry were true.
Amid the whirl of activity, Ti-Philippe tracked down the Doge's astrologer.
I went to see the man with Remy and Ti-Philippe, and I was glad I'd taken both, for I saw another side to La Serenissima, winding through the smaller canals in the poorer quarters of the city. Here, the work of building this city on the sea was evident. Brackish water flowed sluggishly in the narrow canals and ramshackle wooden houses crowded together, built on ill-drained