The Medici Prize (The Stolen Crown Trilogy Book 1)

by Sylvia Prince

  Caterina knew from the minute James had started speaking that his was a sad story. Or, really, she’d known even earlier. There was a shadow in his eyes, a sense of loss that sometimes snuck into his expression when he thought no one was watching.

  Caterina chided herself for wondering if it was guilt rather than sorrow. Now that she’d heard his story, she felt embarrassed about how she’d behaved. She’d pushed and pushed, ordering him around as if he were hers to command. James worked for Piero de’ Medici, not her, and yet she’d treated him no better than a servant. Or worse, since her actions had thrown James into the only jail cell in Civita.

  As light seeped out of the sky and dusk turned dark in the forest, they pushed farther north. Neither mentioned stopping for the evening. They wordlessly agreed to get as far from Civita as possible before they rested.

  But soon, even guiding the horse became difficult in the dark. The half moon provided some light, but under the leafy ceiling of the forest Caterina couldn’t see five feet down the path.

  When they stopped, Caterina was too tired to set up the tent. She looked at the thin patch of grass and shuttered. James couldn’t have seen her—he was already pulling out the tent bag as she surveyed the ground—but in minutes her tent was standing.

  The next morning dawned to blue skies. As they chewed on the last of the apples, Caterina looked south. “I would have liked to see the donkey race.”

  The corner of James’s mouth tilted up, and a second later he was laughing, a full-body chuckle that shook his shoulders. Caterina couldn’t hold back her own laughter. Somehow, it broke the silence that had held since the jail.

  Caterina longed to ask James more questions—where had he gone after Scotland? How did he escape the slave ship? Why hadn’t he mentioned that he knew how to read?—but she held her tongue. Speaking without thinking had already gotten her into trouble. She had practically acted like James was an uncivilized barbarian, incapable of reason, but how wrong she’d been. The guilt gnawed at her insides.

  Still, she couldn’t contain her curiosity for long. “What made you come to Florence?” That seemed like an innocuous enough question.

  James tied the last of their supplies to the back of the horse. “I wanted to see the dome.”

  “Really?” She’d expected something else—the high wages, or a chance to work for the Medici.

  James nodded. He held out a shoulder to boost her onto the horse’s back. Caterina gratefully accepted the assistance. His stallion was quite tall, and she wasn’t very graceful when she tried to launch herself atop it. “We had news of your dome even in Scotland,” James continued. “I wanted to see if it lived up to its reputation.”

  “And did it?”

  “Yes.” James scanned the trees as he spoke. The man was always alert for another attack. “My jaw still drops every time I catch sight of it.”

  “Like when you’re walking down the Via de’ Martelli and you round the corner into the Piazza del Duomo. And suddenly it’s right there, looming over everything.” Caterina’s longing for Florence roared back, nearly knocking the air out of her. She could see the city in front of her, the bustling shops of the mercato and the mix of doublets, dresses, and cassocks swirling in front of the cathedral. Caterina wouldn’t let her mind wander north of the piazza toward the Medici Palace. She couldn’t.

  “Did you see the scoppio del caro last Easter? The explosion was so big I thought the cathedral might catch on fire.”

  Caterina shook her head. Her father hadn’t let her attend the annual Easter tradition, where the city set fire to a cart to celebrate a Pazzi ancestor who had scaled the walls of Jerusalem during the first Crusade. Piero claimed it wasn’t safe. Now Caterina wondered if he’d been right. “What about the feast day for Saint John? The parade went right past the Medici Palace this year and I watched everything from the gate.”

  “Mazzeo told me that Piero himself rearranged the parade route so that it would pass your palace.”

  Caterina fell silent. Was it true? James had no reason to lie. She had begged her father to let her attend the festivities, longing to see the ceremonial marches with sacred relics and images. Piero had held out for weeks, until finally he agreed she could watch from the palace, escorted by her two brothers. It had been one of the happiest moments of Caterina’s life, waving to the men in the parade and cheering alongside her fellow Florentines.

  And her father had changed the route, for her?

  Caterina’s chest tightened. She’d been so angry with her parents for sending her away that she brushed off their concerns as unfounded anxiety. But after she’d seen Fiametta carried off and the wagon driver pierced with arrows, those fears didn’t seem so unreasonable.

  They’d only been trying to protect her.

  The silence held for another mile, and then two. James seemed to sense Caterina’s inward turn and didn’t press her.

  Caterina let her mind wander, remembering days spent with her brothers in Fiesole, daring each other to jump off the low roof of the barn, and evenings curled up with Nannina to read stories. Lucrezia brushing her hair, showing her how to braid it. Piero, before the gout had slowed him, chasing them through the courtyard pretending to be a monster.

  Her eyes turned to James. Did he have similar memories of Wallace and Ina? What would it feel like, to lose her entire family and her home? Caterina had thought she’d experienced loss when her parents sent her to the convent, but that was nothing like losing your family to violence and being sold into slavery.

  How did someone recover from that?

  As she watched James, his steps quick and even ahead of her horse, she wondered if he had never recovered.

  And yet, when the attack on their caravan started, hadn’t James run directly into combat, taking on two men at once and ignoring an arrow poking through his arm? Caterina would have run away screaming. In fact, that’s almost what she’d done. Yes, she’d left the carriage to find a sword, but she hadn’t done anything with the blade. She hadn’t leapt at James when he rounded the side of the fallen wagon.

  She hadn’t even protected Fiametta.

  Maybe she should have told James to take her to the convent. She was a target, after all, and just being near her had made Fiametta vulnerable. Did her maid still live? Where was she? Caterina sent up another silent prayer that the woman was safe, one of a hundred identical pleas that hadn’t been answered.

  But Caterina had convinced James to take her back to Florence. What would James think if he found out she’d tricked him to avoid being locked in the convent? She’d claimed the kidnappers would follow them to Viterbo, but it wasn’t fear of another attack that stopped Caterina’s hand. If anything, she’d be safer in the convent.

  If she told James the truth, Caterina had a sinking suspicion that the guard would turn around and march her straight to the convent.

  They set up camp at dusk, in a secluded patch of grass ringed by trees. Caterina looked up at the shapes cast by the leaves waving above her. Dark clouds had rolled into the sky, giving the impression of night even before the sun was completely down. By the time Caterina’s eyes traveled back to the earth, James had set up the tent.

  Caterina stretched her shoulders and pointed her toes one foot at a time. The soft leather boots weren’t meant for this much walking, but they felt good against her feet. As usual, they didn’t light a fire. But the saddlebags still contained the last batch of roasted chestnuts and dried meat.

  “I have a falcon, you know.” The words slipped out of Caterina’s mouth.

  James raised an eyebrow from his spot across from her. “You do?”

  “It’s kind of a secret, though. I’m not supposed to do that kind of thing.”

  James chewed thoughtfully. “What kind of thing are you supposed to do?”

  Caterina sighed. “I’m supposed to listen to my parents and obey their commands.”

  “That’s what I’m supposed to do, too,” James said with a wry grin.

  �
��It’s not the same.” Caterina wasn’t sure how to explain it. “All the lessons I’ve had, reading Roman histories and reciting Catullus, studying with the humanist philosophers . . . It was all training to turn me into a perfect patrician’s wife. So I could converse with foreign visitors and educate my own children some day. I never thought of my education as training for marriage until recently. I always loved reading. But I read for myself, because I want to, not because it makes me attractive to suitor on the marriage market.”

  The words tumbled out of Caterina. She hadn’t voiced such thoughts aloud to anyone, but James had bared his secrets last night. Tonight it was her turn. Within reason, of course. He didn’t need to know everything.

  “That’s why I loved my falcon. I did that just for me, not because someone told me I should. Sometimes all the expectations I carry around feel unbearable.”

  “You’re speaking in the past tense,” James pointed out quietly. “Can’t you still falcon when I get you back to Florence?”

  Caterina looked off into the woods. Once they got back to Florence, what would her father do? The attack had only proven his fears correct. Would he send her right back to the convent?

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly.

  They fell into silence again.

  Caterina stood, brushing off her dress. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  But as she turned toward the tent, James stopped her with a question.

  “What did you name the falcon?”

  She turned around. “What makes you so sure I named her?”

  “You name everything,” he said, tilting his head toward Cosimo the horse.

  Caterina felt a grin spread across her face. “Bettina. My falcon is named Bettina.”

  James returned her smile. “I’d like to meet Bettina some day.”

  Caterina felt a tightness in her chest. Instead of responding, she gave James a nod. “Goodnight.”

  She slipped into the tent, her stomach churning. What did it mean that James wanted to see her falcon? And why had she even told him about Bettina? Caterina felt exposed, as if she’d just bared herself in front of a stranger.

  Well, that’s exactly what I did, she thought. Why was she opening up to James? He’d told her about his childhood—and only because she’d forced him—but why did that require reciprocation?

  Caterina slid between her blankets, her heart pounding. When she closed her eyes, she could still see that cheeky grin on James’s face.

  She drifted off thinking of Bettina flying through the air, free and unburdened.

  The sound of rain pounding on the tent woke her in the night. Caterina blinked, wondering how many hours had passed. Was it midnight? Later? The smell of rain seeped through the tent, fresh and earthy. For a moment, Caterina snuggled down into the blankets, enjoying the patter on the cloth above her. It was warm and dry in the tent.

  Then she remembered James. He was outside in the clearing somewhere, probably drenched in the rain. His sopping blanket might take a day to dry, and his clothes would be damp past noon.

  With a sigh, Caterina sat up. She couldn’t leave him in the downpour while she sat cozy in the tent.

  She peeked out of the tent, avoiding the rain, searching the dark for James.

  “James?” She whispered first, and then repeated herself louder. “James?”

  His voice came from the edge of the woods. “I’m here.”

  “It’s pouring rain. Please, come into the tent.” She could almost hear his hesitation. “We can sleep with your sword laid between us, like in the chivalric romances.”

  Caterina held her breath waiting for his response. A second later, he was pushing his way into the tent, dripping water on the ground.

  Caterina’s eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. She could see the outline of James on the other side of the tent, just beyond her arm’s reach. Caterina had never slept so close to a man in her entire life. “Are your blankets soaked?”

  “No, I took shelter under a tree once it started raining. There wasn’t enough room to lie down, though.” He was spreading out his blankets.

  “I wasn’t serious about the sword,” Caterina said. It suddenly seemed childish to use knight’s tales to make choices. She was a grown woman, after all, old enough to marry. She didn’t need a sword to act honorably. And would James think she brought up the sword because she thought he wouldn’t be able to contain himself? Had she somehow started their old fight simply by mentioning a story from a book?

  “I know. But I brought it anyway.” He laid it down between them.

  Caterina’s breath caught in her chest. How did James respond to everything so evenly? Nothing seemed to ruffle him. Caterina, on the other hand, flew off at the smallest thing.

  She settled in her blankets and closed her eyes. The sound of rain filled the tent, but in between the patter she heard the soft, even breaths of James.

  Caterina didn’t fall back asleep for a long time.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The hilltop town in the distance looked like Civita, magnified by twenty.

  “We’ll avoid Orvieto,” Caterina declared as James gazed at the city in the distance.

  James had already decided to skirt the city of Orvieto, but he just nodded and let Caterina feel in charge. She wasn’t like him, James had learned. To Caterina, appearances mattered, and she always wanted to appear like a Medici, which meant in control.

  The afternoon sun beat down on them. James longed for the cooler shade of the forests they’d left behind north of Civita. Their food supplies were dwindling, too, in spite of Caterina’s successful mushroom hunting. James had set up a snare last night and caught a rabbit, but fires attracted too much attention, so they couldn’t rely on game.

  “Why can’t we just light a fire?” Caterina had asked the previous evening, staring down at the raw, stripped body of the rabbit.

  “There might still be people looking for us. For you,” James pointed out.

  “I’d risk it for some cooked food,” Caterina grumbled. “And anyway, we could still use the story from Civita—that we were visiting family near Viterbo. We can tell people we’re brother and sister.”

  James held up the fresh, pink meat and decided Caterina was right. A small fire wouldn’t risk too much. But only this once, he’d said. If they kept riding hard and didn’t run into more trouble, they could be in Florence in a week’s time.

  It had been three days since Caterina had invited him into her tent. Three days of lying across from her, leaving a wide strip of grass between them, and wondering what was running through her mind.

  James had never shared a tent with a woman before. He tried to think of Caterina as just another person, but she was worlds apart from the hairy, loud guards that James had bunked with in the past. She was so quiet. He marveled at the lack of sounds as she slept, barely a sigh coming from her blankets. And she awoke quickly, her eyes flashing with light as soon as she opened them. Caterina never looked over at his corner of the tent when she woke, and they had an unspoken rule that they didn’t talk in the tent. But James was grateful for the break from the rain.

  Caterina wasn’t just another person, and she wasn’t just another woman, either. She was the daughter of Piero de’ Medici, the granddaughter of the great Cosimo.

  What would happen when they reached Florence? Would she go back to her life as the daughter of a patrician, a world completely separate from James? Could he go back to serving as a Medici guard?

  For a moment, as James stared at Orvieto, he considered leaving Florence. He’d lived in the city for two years, the longest he’d spent in any place outside of Scotland, and it might be time to move on.

  But when he imagined staring at Florence for the last time, standing on the Via Romana south of the city where he could see the entire walled marvel stretched out in the valley, hugging the Arno river, James felt a tightness in his chest. He didn’t want to leave Florence.

  That was the problem with staying in
a place too long. You got attached.

  But James knew it wasn’t just Florence that he’d miss.

  He snuck a glance at Caterina out of the corner of his eye. She had turned her back on Orvieto to study the rolling Umbrian countryside ahead of them.

  “I see a farm house up that way,” she said, breaking James from his thoughts. He followed her finger and caught sight of the low, wooden structure. “We could buy food there.”

  James was already shaking his head before she finished the sentence. “It’s too risky. Your voice, your accent—what if they recognize a Florentine patrician’s daughter?”

  Fire flashed in Caterina’s eyes. It was already an old argument, and they both knew which roles they played. “You think an Umbrian farmer is that discerning?”

  “You never know.” But privately, James thought she might be right. And he was getting tired of chestnuts and mushrooms. So when Caterina pushed, he finally assented.

  He could see an added bounce in her steps as they continued down the path. She did enjoy getting her way.

  As they drew closer, James checked and rechecked his sword, tightening the belt and repositioning the knife concealed in his boot. Just in case they found trouble.

  But the only person in the house was a young woman who told them her husband was in Orvieto selling their recently harvested grapes. She gave them a thick wedge of crumbling cheese and two fresh loaves of bread, plus a sack full of dark red grapes. When she offered a room for the night, Caterina practically jumped at the possibility, but James said no. Thankfully, Caterina didn’t contradict him in front of the woman.

  Once they were back on the road, Caterina glared at him from atop the horse. “I wouldn’t mind sleeping in a bed again.” She popped a grape into her mouth. James had never seen someone eat with such restrained ire before. It was hard to look away.

  He plucked a grape from the bunch. It exploded, tangy and slightly sweet, between his teeth. “I didn’t want to fight with you over sleeping arrangements. I don’t want to end up in another jail cell.” He kept his voice light, but there was truth behind his words. The woman had offered a room, not rooms, and a tent was far different from a bed. He didn’t want to fight with Caterina again, either. Not when they’d finally fallen into a comfortable routine, taking turns walking and riding the horse, looking for food at midday, stopping at streams to refill the waterskins, and sleeping at night in the tent.