by V. Briceland
Happiness caused a lump to form in her throat, but pride in her king and country banished it. She drew in a breath and spoke to the crowd. “I give you Alessandro!” She was proud to see that Milo was the first to fall to his knees, followed quickly by Camilla and the rest of the assembly.
It seemed to her ears that the joyfulness in her voice was no less musical than the horn that rested within reach. “I give you your king and the bearer of the Olive Crown!”
epilogue
—
In the Piazza Divetri, over the sound of a hundred hammers, it was difficult for Risa to hear what the old woman said. When her words ended in a clasping and kissing of hands, Risa knew she had received another wish for good fortune and a long life. She had received many of those lately from people she had never before met. Old or young, wealthy or poor, she always returned the blessings with a smile, and a kiss of her own on both cheeks.
As the old woman trundled off, waving her farewells, Milo approached with the last of her parcels on his shoulders. Into the cart it went, atop the other bundles. “Poor old donkeys!” he whistled, pretending to be disturbed. He patted a perfumed hide as he joined her by the balustrade overlooking the canal. “They’ll keel over on the way, with everything you’re making them haul.”
On impulse she took his hand in hers, and together they leaned against the stone rail of the piazza. Beyond the lower bridge and over the canals, scores of men and women labored over the shell of Caza Portello. No bigger than water bugs were they from this distance, but their hammers and pry bars glinted in the morning sun as they went about their construction. “Urbano Portello told me last night that he’s almost glad his caza has to be rebuilt,” Milo told her. “He said that enchantments can’t make up for the shoddy architecture of his ancestors. Besides, it gives the insulas something constructive to do with their time.”
At the royal banquet the night before, Milo had been a popular guest. All of the seven cazarri had treated him as their own son. Michele Catarre had presented both Sorrantos with beautifully illuminated books on weaponry and swordsmanship; the cazarro of Piratimare had promised Milo a specially made gondola of his very own. During Ricard and Tania’s after-dinner entertainments, Urbano Portello had monopolized Milo’s attention, and Dioro’s cazarro had pledged to provide Camilla and Milo with the finest weapons they could desire, throughout their lives.
Most mortifying, however, was when Dana Buonochio made both Risa and Milo promise to pose together for a painting Alessandro commissioned for the throne room—a depiction of the pair kneeling before the recrowned king on the Divetri balcony. “Ah, but Cazarra, I must commission two,” the king had interjected after his announcement. “For I wish to have a portrait of my new chief bodyguard as well.” Camilla had turned white at the news, and struggled hard for the rest of the evening to maintain her composure.
“You’re thinking about that painting, aren’t you?” asked Milo. A gull cawed overhead as it swooped down to retrieve some garbage on the canal waters.
Surprised, she turned to him. “How did you know?”
“You’re covering your nose again.” Hastily she jerked her free hand away from her face. “Honestly, Risa. I don’t know what you’re worrying about. You don’t have a duck nose. You’re very pretty.” His voice turned low and earnest. “I thought so from the first time I saw you.”
“No you didn’t,” she said, blushing and hoping that he would contradict her with more flattery. It was a luxury to stand there with him in the sunlight, holding hands with no fear of the day ahead. It had seemed, over the past week, that the simple things had given her the greatest happiness. The sound of her mother’s laughter. Her younger brother’s clownish antics. Fita’s grousing. Milo’s smile.
“Yes, I did. I even said so. You’ve got a ways to go on accepting compliments.” His wry tone made her laugh.
Behind and over them came the sound of a deep-voiced man clearing his throat. “I trust I’m not interrupting anything?”
Giulia’s rebuke followed quickly. “Now, Ero!”
“I don’t know, wife. We don’t know a thing about the boy who will be taking our daughter away.” Her father sounded stern, but Risa could tell that he was only teasing. Moments after his release, Ero had lifted Milo off the ground and hugged him like a son, and then had spent the rest of the week attempting to convince him to quit the city guards and become a glass blower in the Divetri workshops, like Amo.
“He’s only taking me over to Caza Cassamagi,” Risa pretended to complain.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep nights, thinking of you there,” Giulia fretted. “The residence is in ruins. Ferrer’s an old man. Does he even know whether there’s still a roof on her chambers?” Most of the worry lines on her mother’s face had been erased since her release from the palace, but she still seemed to have aged during her captivity. A few gray hairs even streaked through her dark tresses. Were they recent, or had Risa simply never noticed them?
“Not all the cazas are as badly damaged as Portello, my beautiful worrier,” Ero assured her, his bass voice rumbling in amusement. “The freeing of Cassamagi’s little enchantments did little damage. Even Piratimare’s damage was concentrated on the piers outside its sea walls and its dry docks. Our daughter will not be sleeping under the stars.”
“I just wish she didn’t have to go.” Though she smiled, Giulia moved to her husband’s side for comfort and laid her head on his shoulder.
Last night, both King Alessandro and Ferrer had made the public announcement that Risa would divide her time between their residences. She would spend the next few years living at Cassamagi, attempting to decipher the earliest records of the caza and the handwritten notes of Allyria Cassamagi herself. As she chose, she would also be studying the oldest manuscripts in the palace’s libraries, searching for keys that could unlock the power inside herself that was as yet mere potential.
At first, she had greeted the news with a wrinkled nose; even at her most enthusiastic, Risa had never been much of a bookworm. The image of dusty tomes and sunless days had been relieved, however, by the king’s talk with Milo.
“For your future, I have in mind a special position,” he had said to Milo when he had taken them both aside for a private audience. Light danced in the monarch’s eyes, as if he held a secret. “A very special position indeed. It will require a knowledge of diplomacy and history, of war and of peace-keeping. I think it is a position suitable for a young man such as yourself, a young man of a fearless nature and a swift mind and a keen sword—but you will have to study.” When Milo had asked where he was to study and who would teach him, Alessandro replied, “There are texts in the palace libraries I will ask you to read. I will serve as your tutor … for a while. In the years after I am gone, however, you will have to rely upon experience and instinct. Just as I have.”
King Alessandro had smiled at them both, then, and was preparing to send them back to the banquet, but Milo had one question more. The most important question. “Will I be able to see Risa?”
His expression caused the king to laugh loud and hard. When he had calmed down, he shook his head. “As if I could keep you two apart! She will be here in the libraries often enough, lad, and Caza Cassamagi will be but a short punt away in your fine new Piratimare gondola. You will see enough of the girl, if she’ll have you.”
Afterward, Milo had been wild with curiosity about the position King Alessandro had in mind. Was it as ambassador to Pays d’Azur? A diplomatic post in one of the frontier countries? All that night he had invented increasingly wild scenarios, even at one low point speculating that the king was embalming him in the dusty old library merely to keep him out of trouble.
Risa had her own suspicions about what position King Alessandro had in mind, but she vowed never to voice them. Her brief contact with the crown and scepter had brought her closer to the thoughts of those w
ho bore them. Though she professed not to be a mind-reader, she felt warm inside at the certainty that Milo’s future would be both bright and glorious.
“One thing, love,” said her father, drawing her aside as Milo hopped into the Divetri cart. “I’ve a present for you.” He withdrew, from the back of the cart, a box he had hidden there a few moments before—one of the padded boxes in which he sent Divetri glass to Pascal’s in the Via Dioro.
Feeling like a child on the day of the Feast of Oranges, Risa unlatched the box. She gasped. Her father had blown for her a slender vase of the deepest blue and green glass. The colors undulated like waves. “It’s beautiful,” she told him in a whisper, drawn by the beauty of its colors.
“It is a flower vase, with the primary purpose of keeping flowers fresh. They will not last forever, but they will bloom for a long, long time. Do you not recognize it?” He smiled when she shook her head in puzzlement. “Mattio gathered up the scraps you had abandoned on the balcony, the night you returned our king to us. It is your own bowl, my little lioness.”
Her mother quickly took the box as Risa threw herself into her father’s arms. More than at any time before, it struck Risa that she was leaving them both. Often had she longed to, in the past. Now that the moment had come, more than anything she wanted to stay. Ero’s whiskers tickled her ear as he lifted her up. He whispered, “You will always be the true cazarra here, little one. More so even than I. No matter where you are, no matter what you become, you are Caza Divetri. I, or anyone else who blows our horn, only stand in your stead. Do you understand?”
She nodded as he put her down, too overwhelmed by his admission to speak. Tears filled her eyes while her mother kissed her with a soft and heartfelt goodbye. Milo had the decency to find the Sorrendi house fascinating as she climbed into the cart and wiped the streaks from her face. Then, with a flick of the reins, he set the donkeys into motion.
After the last few waves to her parents, Risa spent a moment composing herself. “Well,” she said finally, finding herself almost ridiculously excited at what the rest of the day would hold. “I suppose now I can finally do something important with my life.”
Milo laughed, just as she’d hoped he might. “You’ve already done a lifetime of important things and everyone knows it, from the king to that little old woman in the street!” He still seemed amused at her joke. “What was she saying to you, anyway?”
“Who?”
“The little old woman.”
“Oh. She wanted to give me the gods’ blessing,” Risa replied, remembering how the woman had murmured over her hands before pressing her lips to them.
“You’ve had plenty of hand-kissing this week!” he said.
They turned from the piazza into the street that would take them along the city’s eastern coast. One of the Portello workmen, a boy wearing the robes of the Penitents and carrying a basket of bricks, waved cheerfully as they passed. On the canals below, birds squabbled for floating scraps of bread. Above the sound of the donkey’s clattering hooves, Milo began to whistle a tune. It was Ricard’s song, written for her.
No matter what might happen to her, no matter what she became, she was Risa, the glass maker’s daughter. She always would be.
For a moment she rested her head on Milo’s shoulder, enjoying his warmth and the clean smell of his skin. There was only one answer she could give him:
“That’s because I am abundantly blessed.”
The Song of the Glass Maker’s Daughter
A shrill cry of woe sounds into the night.
The city lies quiet in dread.
And high in the palace, a king in his robes
Lies quiet and still: He is dead.
A thunder as hoofbeats pound over the bridge—
Its echoes sound over the water
“Oh father, don’t leave me!” resounds a soft cry—
The cry of the glass maker’s daughter.
“The caza’s so empty, my brothers are gone.
No sisters I have I can turn to!”
Tears fell down her cheek, so pale, soft, and fair.
To stroke them away, men would burn to.
She stood ’neath the moons. They cast down soft rays.
A goddess in white, yes, I thought her.
“Yet no harm will come here. Oh gods, hear my vow!”
Cried Risa, the glass maker’s daughter.
The night passed, the moons set. The sun took their place.
No sign of her parents did greet her.
She wandered alone, her fair self not knowing
Another had plans to defeat her.
“The caza is mine!” said a cousin of hers,
“Every room, every chair, every quarter.
Cazarro I am, and I’ll prove it this night
To all, and the glass maker’s daughter!”
The sun settled down ever close to the ground.
Of countenance glad she is shorn—
Our Risa, she shudders, she startles with fright
At the sound of the palace’s horn.
“Blow now, my cousin!” she cried with alarm
To the man determined to thwart her.
“We’ll all come to doom and the house will be harmed!”
Came the plea of the glass maker’s daughter.
A rumbling shook poor Portello that eve.
Foundations were rocking like thunder.
And Risa’s poor cousin and servants took fright:
The girl spoke as they looked on with wonder.
“I’ll not let my caza see such dire fate!”
And just as her father had taught her,
She took up the horn. Everyone marveled
At the brave, fearless glass maker’s daughter.
A blossoming tone deafened all who stood round
As she blew in the marvelous horn.
“Cazarra am I!” she cried loud, without fear,
And she looked at her cousin with scorn.
The caza she saved, that night of dark fate—
Every brick stayed firm in its mortar.
And the masses sang loud, round the beautiful maid,
This tale of the glass maker’s daughter!
About the Author
V. Briceland wanted to be an archaeologist when he grew up. Instead, he has worked as a soda jerk, a paper-flower maker in an amusement park, a pianist for a senior citizens’ show-tunes choir, an English teacher, and a glass artist. He likes writing novels best of all. He lives in Royal Oak, Michigan, where there is a sad lack of ruins to be excavated.