The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [98]
Esverinna Taurochi dachi Calavai. She’d been tall, as tall as Cazio, with limbs that seemed a bit long and awkward. Eyes like honey and hazelnut mixed together and long, long hair that sprouted almost black but paled to the color of her eyes toward the ends. He remembered that she always hunched just a little, as if ashamed of her regal height. In his arms, her length had felt luxurious, something he could stretch against infinitely.
She was beautiful but unaware of her beauty. Passionate but innocent of her desires. They both had been thirteen; she was already promised to marry a far older man from Esquavin. He had thought to duel the man, he remembered, but Esverinna had stopped him with these words: You will never truly love me. He does not love me, but he might.
Maio Dechiochi d’Avella had been a distant cousin of the Mediccio of Avella, the town of Cazio’s birth. Like most young men of means in that place, he studied fencing with Mestro Estenio. Cazio had quarreled with him about the result of a game of dice. Swords had been drawn. Cazio remembered how surprised he had been to see fear in Maio’s eyes. He himself had felt only exhilaration.
The duel had consisted of exactly three passes: an unconvincing feint by Maio, becoming an attack in seft to Cazio’s thigh, and his parry of the attack and riposte in prismo, resulting in Maio’s mad scramble out of distance. Cazio had renewed the attack; Maio parried violently but did not riposte. Cazio repeated the attack, exactly the same as before; again Maio blocked without responding, apparently happy just to have stopped the thrust. Cazio quickly redoubled and hit him in the upper arm.
He had been twelve, and Maio thirteen. It was the first time he had ever felt flesh give beneath his steel.
Marisola Serechii da Ceresa. Fine obsidian hair, the face of a child, the heart of a wolf. She knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was to watch Cazio fight for her and then exhaust what remained of his energy in the silk sheets of her bed. She was a licker, a biter, a screamer, and she treated his body as if it were a rare treat she would never have enough of. She had stood hardly to his chest, but with three touches she could rob him off his will. She had been eighteen, and he had been sixteen. He often wondered if she was a witch and thought for certain she was when she dismissed him. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t love him, and years later one of his friends told him her father had threatened to hire assassins if she did not break with Cazio and marry the man he had chosen. Cazio never got to question her about it; she died in childbirth a year after her marriage.
St. Abulo Serechii da Ceresa, Marisola’s older brother, had spent time in the their hometown of Ceresa, studying writing and swordplay with his grand-uncle’s mestro. Aware of the relationship with his sister, St. Abulo had let drop a casually insulting remark regarding Cazio in the Tauro et Purca tavern, knowing it would get back to him. They had arranged to meet in the apple grove outside of town, each with a second and a crowd of admirers. St. Abulo was small, like his sister, but devastatingly quick, and he affected the somewhat antiquated tradition of using a mano nertro, a dagger for the left hand. The fight had ended when St. Abulo mistimed a counterthrust; he hit Cazio in the thigh, but Cazio skewered him in the ear. It was clear to both men that Cazio could as easily have stabbed him in the eye. St. Abulo conceded the point, but his second would not agree, and so he and Cazio’s second had taken up the duel. Before long, the bystanders took to one another, as well. Cazio and St. Abulo retired to watch the brawl, bind their wounds, and drink several bottles of wine.
St. Abulo admitted that he wasn’t really much concerned with his sister’s virtue but that his father had put him up to it. He and Cazio shook hands and parted friends, which they remained until