by V. Briceland
It was time for the announcements. The crowd suppressed all noise to hear. “The Goddess Lena has chosen the Cazarrino Petro as one of her own,” thundered Renaldo Settecordi. “Let him advance and take his place among her Penitents!”
A roar of cheering and applause erupted from the crowd. Risa’s vision clouded slightly with tears at the sight of her brother’s face. He looked as if he might be violently sick all over the courtyard, but at the sound of the Penitent’s proclamation he breathed deeply, shuddered a little, and then stumbled forward. A wan smile tickled his lips as he realized more fully that he had been chosen. Finally he grinned, in real relief. Had he thought he would be unclaimed? No child of the Seven and Thirty had ever been denied the insulas.
Mira had stepped out, lifting high a turquoise banner behind Renaldo, who rested a paternal hand on Petro’s shoulders. Showers of daisies filled the air as the crowd tossed handfuls of petals at the newly chosen one. As he crossed the courtyard, Petro peered through the cascade of white and waved at her, his little hat askew. Risa thought he looked genuinely happy for the first time that day.
After a moment of celebration, the crowd grew quiet once more, anticipating another announcement. Renaldo stepped back, gesturing for Romeldo to speak.
Romeldo, however, merely nodded back. His face was blank and expectant. After a long moment, he held out a hand toward Renaldo, as if indicating that he should continue. The other scrutineer seemed startled. There was a long pause as the two stared at each other. Romeldo still made no move to claim Risa for the god.
At last, obviously confused, the two stepped forward and began to whisper. Renaldo shook his head violently when Romeldo pointed in Risa’s direction. The crowd began to murmur with surprise at the break from traditional ritual. Ero shifted in his seat, alert.
Risa grew more unsettled with every second of suspense. Behind the banner, Mira’s face was as perplexed as her own. The smells of heavy perfume and sweat from the crowd seemed even more overpowering than before; bodies pressed in close on every side, obscuring her view of her parents. All Risa could see were strangers shaking her heads while looking directly at her. She must have done something wrong, though she couldn’t remember having taken a step out of place or spoken when she shouldn’t. The uncertainty felt like it would kill her if it lasted much longer.
Why did Romeldo delay? After a few more moments, the conversation between the scrutineers came to a conclusion. They both seemed dissatisfied with the other. With great apprehension, Risa watched as her brother at last walked in her direction. The same puzzled look colored his expression, but there was something else as well: pity.
He pitied her. Why?
With bended knees, Romeldo lowered himself down to bring his mouth to her ear. His breath tickled at her skin. “Sister,” he whispered, clasping her shoulders. “This is … difficult for me to tell you. I cannot believe it myself.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked. Fear choked her throat. She could not imagine what could be causing him to say these words.
He sighed, steeling himself to deliver the news. “You are unchosen.”
Despite the heat and the heaviness of her gown, Risa felt icy cold at his words. “What?”
“You have not been chosen,” he repeated. When she tried to wrestle free of his grasp, he held her more tightly. “Don’t make a scene,” he warned.
Her voice, when it came, was cracked with emotion. “Unchosen? No!”
“I am so sorry … ”
“What did I do wrong?” This nightmare was impossible. It couldn’t be happening. No one was unchosen. Never. It was unheard of. She had spent her entire life waiting for this ceremony; she had imagined this hour the way some girls dreamed of their weddings. It was supposed to be the most perfect, happiest day of her life—a when, not an if.
Her brother’s mouth still pressed against her ear. “You’ve done nothing wrong, little sparrow. Nothing. The gods have their reasons to—”
“Romeldo,” she whispered, ashamed at the desperation in her voice. “Go back and tell them Muro chose me. You can just tell them. It doesn’t even have to be true.” With every word she willed him to obey.
“I cannot.”
“You’re my brother!” she cried, more loudly than she intended. Her throat was tight with pressure. “Please!”
“Risa, I cannot. It doesn’t work that way. My vows—”
“This isn’t happening!”
Ero and Giulia had hastened over to them as they talked, expressions of concern and bewilderment on their faces. In the distance, echoing over the canal waters and through the streets, Risa could hear sounds of cheering from nearby parts of the city. Other families were celebrating. Their own courtyard was deadly silent. Risa scanned the faces nearby. So many were familiar—servants, distant relatives, neighbors, family friends. They had all come to see her elevated. Instead, they were witnessing her humiliation.
“What’s wrong?” asked Ero in a hushed voice.
“She has not been chosen.” The words seemed to echo across the silent courtyard.
“That doesn’t happen,” Ero countered. His face was pale. “It’s never happened. Every child of the Seven and Thirty has always been welcomed at the insulas.”
Romeldo cleared his throat and straightened up. “Please, sir. Don’t make this any more difficult—”
“Is this a joke? You must be mistaken!” So hoarse and angry were Ero’s words that Giulia clutched his arm. “Pray again. Pray again! Or you are no son of mine.”
Romeldo raised an eyebrow. “The gods do not trifle with their priests, Cazarro,” he said, emphasizing Ero’s title to drive home his graveness. “Settecordi and I received the same response to our prayers. Both the god and his sister spoke to us to say the child is not needed at their insulas.”
During the argument, Risa’s tears had begun to flow. She realized her face was red and blotched, and that the tears would puddle on her gown and cause the silks to pucker. She knew that weeping so publicly disgraced her family. Yet she felt as if Muro and Lena had reached down from the heavens to tear her still-beating heart from her chest. How could they be so cruel to her at what was to have been her proudest moment? What had she ever done to them? It was unjust—worse, it was vicious.
“If the gods don’t need me,” she shouted, savagely clawing at the tapes woven in her hair, “then I don’t need the gods!”
“Risa!” Romeldo looked thunderstruck.
As she ran into the residence, shoving with tear-blind eyes through the crowd, she heard her father’s sad and heavy voice behind her. “Let her go,” he said. “Just … let her go.”
Ribbons and loose hair fluttered behind her in her flight. Let the people gawk! She didn’t care if they saw her tears. No humiliation was worse than the sadness in her father’s voice when he had spoken those dismissive words: Let her go. She had failed him badly. She had failed the family and its name.
Through the dining hall she ran, nearly colliding into immense tables laden with all manner of succulents. The Divetris and their friends would feast later to celebrate Petro. It was to have been her banquet too—had the gods wanted her.
They did not. If even the gods turned their faces away, then she was not needed or wanted by anyone. She was a freak. An embarrassment.
Through grand hall and vestibule her quick feet took her, up stairs that never seemed to end, then through hallway after hallway until at last she reached the safety of her own chambers. She thought slamming the door would give her satisfaction. It did not. Once it was latched tight, she sank to the floor and once more began to cry. Her face and gown were already soaked with salty tears. Moisture flowed from her nostrils. She did not bother to wipe her face.
“Risa?” A soft knock sounded on her door a few minutes later. Giulia’s voice, muffled, came through the wood. “Risa? My darli
ng … ”
She did not answer. For long minutes she sat there, face buried in her skirts, scarcely daring to breathe. At last she heard her mother’s slippered feet gliding away. She would never answer, no matter how hard they knocked. No consolation could soothe her heartbreak. Nothing could erase the echo of her father’s disappointed words: Let her go.
6
—
You wish to disagree with the King? Then stand up on the
Petitioner’s Stair and make your case without rancor. Do not choose the path you propose! The rite of fealty must be completed without hesitation or regret! If you do not … well, remember the fate of Caza Legnoli, my brother, and tremble.
—Arnoldo Piratimare, in a letter to the Cazarro Humberto Piratimare (from the Cassamagi Historical Archives)
At the back of the caza grounds, near the sea wall, the furnaces of the Divetri workshop blazed. Every day they were fed bundles of densely bound wood, enchanted by the Cassamagi to blaze with a blinding white flame. The great ovens were ventilated in a method that produced an even, smokeless heat while maintaining a steady temperature. Many of the workshop’s large blown vessels had to remain in the furnaces for a day or two at a time. If they did not cool at a slow and predictable rate, they ran a risk of shattering.
Risa’s own bowl had remained in the furnaces for over a day and a half. Every few hours she’d moved the foot-wide ceramic mold in which it rested farther and farther away from the heart of the annealing kilns, until finally it was cool enough to slide off the smooth stone shelf. With a swift motion, she picked up her work. The glass bowl warmed her hands instantly, but did not burn them. She blew off the powdered sand separating the glass from the mold, then looked into the reflective surface.
It was beautiful. Plucking a creation from the heat always reminded Risa of the mid-winter Feast of Oranges, the celebration when once a year, children would wake up in the morning and find their blankets littered with fruits and candies and small gifts. Parents told the very young that the trinkets had been left there by an orange tree that sprang up at the foot of their bed while they were asleep, then withered overnight. Risa had outgrown the Feast of Oranges even before she was Petro’s age, but whenever she removed one of her works from the furnace, she had that same itch of anticipation—the desire to see if she would be well rewarded.
Today she had been. Despite the layer of powder and some smudges left by her own fingers, this bowl was among her very best. With some of Mira’s own cobalt blue glass as a base, Risa had cut two layers of varying softly curved waves and fit them together in an undulating pattern that soothed her senses. Caught beneath a cap of melted clear glass, the bowl looked as if it had been held under the waters of the Azure Sea itself and, when lifted out, captured its gentle inland waves.
The warm summer air cooled the bowl as she carried it through her father’s extensive workroom, bent on returning to her own tiny studio. For the past week, Risa had been unusually shy about talking to either of her parents. She had not emerged from her bedchambers until hunger forced her down to the kitchens a full day and a half after her disgrace. With every step, she had cursed her weakness—she would rather have starved to death than appear in public again. Fita had taken one look at her stained and tear-streaked face and sat her down and fed her plate after plate of food. It was probably left over from Petro’s banquet, but Risa did not pay that any heed.
At every opportunity she told herself she did not care that the gods had rejected her. The truth, though, was that it bothered her like a toothache, always throbbing with a dull pain. She thought of the rejection every time she saw the gods’ visages smiling down at her from the steles decorating the caza, or with every servant’s oath that invoked their names. She thought of it when she looked out upon the city and saw tattered decorations from the Feast of the Two Moons flying from gondolas or floating in the canals. Most of all, she thought about it during lonely, quiet moments when she missed her younger brother and wondered what he was doing.
After her self-imposed exile, her parents were cordial and kind. If anything, they seemed determined to pretend nothing at all out of the ordinary had taken place. They carried on around her just as they had on previous days, talking about their work and gossiping about other families within the Seven and Thirty. Of Petro they made no mention, nor did they discuss the Scrutiny. Save for the fact that she alone was left at home, it was almost as if that day had never happened.
With every hour’s toll of the bells in the Palace Square, however, Risa knew that it had happened. She tried not to imagine her parents’ conversations when she was not around—whispered dialogues about how proud they were of their other children, shushed admissions that Risa had been their one disappointment. She tried to banish these thoughts into a cupboard in her mind, muffling them with denial and slamming shut the cupboard doors. Too often, however, they crept through the cracks to haunt her.
“You’re looking well today, Cazarrina,” said Mattio as she scurried by. The large, gentle man stood up to greet her from over the cullet bucket full of crushed glass. It was too late to pretend she hadn’t heard him. Mattio was her favorite craftsman; he had always played with her and encouraged her to develop her skills. Her father had taught her how to cut glass with a diamond-tipped stylus, but it was Mattio who had made her practice over and over again until she could cut even complex curves without flares or accidental breaks. It had been Mattio who taught her how to keep an eye on hot glass to gauge its temperature, and how to make certain that different colors of glass would bond with each other. From Mattio she had received her first lessons in glass blowing. He always praised what he found right with her creations and pointed out what could be improved.
“Is that a new bowl?” he was asking now. “Might I look?”
Shyly, she handed it to him. He ran his fingers around the piece’s edge. “Very smooth and even.” He nodded, impressed. “Very few visible bubbles.” Grasping the bowl by the rim, he held it up to the sunlight streaming through the workshop door. “Beautiful colors. You’ve done well, Cazarrina!”
Risa flushed with pride at his praise. But it was an unaccustomed sensation, feeling good. While gratification should have flooded through her like a cooling river, now it only sliced like a hot knife, making her more aware how ragged her grief had been during the past few days.
“Cazarro!” cried the craftsman, wheeling about and calling to Ero.
“Mattio, don’t,” Risa begged. She had been trying to move through the workroom as quickly as possible, before Ero could see her. Her father was the last person she wanted to talk to.
“Come look at what your daughter has done,” Mattio called.
Ero looked over from a furnace, pole in hand. At its end glowed a glob of glass. Cousin Fredo reached out to take the pole and nodded for Ero to step away. Her father held up a finger to indicate that he needed a moment more. From a bucket of water, he withdrew a branch, cut from one of the family’s olive trees that very morning. Its finger-long, silvery green leaves glistened and dripped as with both hands, Ero raised it into the air. The water prevented the wood and leaves from immediately bursting into flame as he brought the branch close to the white-hot, liquid glass. Then the branch began to steam as Ero used it to trace the signs of the gods in the air, his lips murmuring the prayer that would bless the glass before it took its shape.
Risa felt a tingle of energy in the air as the enchantment took hold. Her father returned the olive branch to its bucket and Fredo plunged the rod back into the furnaces. This rite, this ceremony of creation, should have been her birthright, she realized. It never would be. For the rest of her life she would only stand at arm’s length while feeling the enchantment pass into her father’s vessels. The realization made her heart even heavier.
Wiping the sweat from his brow, Ero made his way across the workroom. “She has an eye for color, your girl,” said Mattio, proffering t
he piece.
Risa flicked her eyes to the floor as her father scanned it. “Very pretty,” he conceded. “Interesting technique.” She looked up with hope. He meant what he said, but then he ruined it by adding, “Do you not like traditional glass blowing, little love? You were advancing quickly with the art.”
“She is a very good hot glass artist when she wants to be,” Mattio replied. “Better than most of our apprentices when they begin. It’s in her blood.”
“Then I don’t understand why she … ” Ero paused to rephrase his thought. “You should join us at the furnaces more, Risa.”
Risa grew more and more resentful as the pair of them talked. It was obvious that as pretty as her father found her experiments, he thought them a waste of time. She chewed back her anger and said to the floor, “I’ll never be like you or Romeldo, Cazarro.”
“There’s always the window art, like your mother,” Ero suggested. “Perhaps if you spent more time with her—”
Risa raised her head and stared at him, her heart now leaden. “I’m sorry to be in your way.”
Ero sighed with frustration. More sweat dampened his brow. “Daughter, I have tried to be patient this week. It frustrates me to watch you ignore the Divetri arts—”
“Now, now,” chided Mattio, playing peacemaker. “Risa is no stranger to either glass blowing or to the construction of leaded windows.”
“Yet she flaunts training and family by turning her back upon them both,” Ero suddenly thundered, his temper flaring at Mattio’s challenge. “Hundreds upon hundreds of years of Divetri tradition!”
“I want to do something different,” Risa explained angrily. Like her father, her temper could erupt without warning. “I want one thing that is mine only.”
“No one wants innovation from Caza Divetri,” shouted her father. “Pretty your trinkets may be, but no one will buy them. You waste your time on such oddities. The Seven and Thirty want vessels as we have always made them, blown and shaped by hand and blessed with the traditional enchantments.”