It surprises her a little, how readily he rises with her, leaves with her, never says goodbye. How little he has to say to the men he fights with. She looks back as he falls into step with her, then looks at him, her brows tugged together, her question unspoken but clear, all the same. She does not want him to think this is necessary, that she somehow requires it. She neglects to remember that she, too, is leaving everything, everyone she knows, just as he is. She forgets that their current lives have no room for the other, and so they have already decided that they will walk away from those lives.
She wants to touch him. She wants to hold his hand when he assures her with gesture or glance or words that this is all right, that it is not forced, that this is not some form of submission he's offering her. She wants to kiss his mouth,
but she tastes death. It clings to her. And she doesn't dare draw him near to it.
--
They go quickly then, through the night streets of Florence. Attentions are drawn primarily to the house de Medici, and her bloody skin and ash-coated hair is covered by a cloak, a hood, her bare feet quick on the cobblestones. She leads him to the merchant district, to the estate of a family well-known in the spice trade. Richly dyed canopies and curtains flutter in their courtyard and around their windows. When they reach the outer gate, a lone guard -- hardly more than a boy -- stands to bar them.
He is young enough, untested enough, that a protracted stare from Matilde is enough to make him choke on the question he knows he's supposed to ask them, the warning he knows he's supposed to give. He does a good job deterring thieves and lurkers, but he cannot look at a wolf in the eyes for more than a few moments, especially not one with blood on her teeth.
"Fetch your master," she tells him. "Tell him it is time for him to pay his debts to the lady of shadows."
The boy, trembling slightly, nods and turns heel, only barely keeping himself from running. The gate is open behind him. Matilde goes through it, closing it behind Bastiano. She follows the boy inside, even, waiting in the entry hall. When the merchant comes down his front stairs, wrapping himself a sumptuous robe, he startles to see Matilde. His eyes flick to the man beside her warily. He is afraid of what he will be told that he owes. It is clear he does not know.
The debt was left open-ended, it seems.
Matilde does not speak to him until he steels himself and comes closer. Until he is within reach. There is something in her carriage that suggests it would dishonor her, show disrespect, if he cowered. When he comes near enough, even then she keeps silent. To his credit, his voice does not waver when he asks her what she requires.
"My companion and I must wash. We require fresh clothing and boots, good for travel, plus waterskins and food for the road. Horses, amenable to riders and distance."
The man does tense a bit at the need for horses, but then he thinks, nodding. He snaps his fingers, glancing upward, and a serving-boy hurries downstairs to be given instructions. He is told to only wake who is absolutely needed. The boy glances fearfully at Matilde, then has fingers snapped at him again and bolts. The merchant turns back to her.
"Is there anything else you require, signori--" he pauses there, glancing at Bastiano, looking back at her, finishing with; "signora?"
This almost amuses her. She tries not to smile. She nods slowly, though, instead.
"When I am gone, forget me. Forget you ever saw or spoke to me. For if I learn you ever spoke or wrote of me in coming years, you will owe a new debt." Her voice lowers, warningly. "And that one will not be so easily repaid."
The man steels himself. He sets his jaw. He nods. Strangely, what shines in his eyes tonight is not so much fear or resentment, but something more like gratitude. He bows to her, then. "Grazie, signora, grazie."
--
That is the last they see of him, at least face to face.
His servants -- and there are many, for he has become exceedingly wealthy in the years since he first met his lady of shadows -- lead Matilde and Bastiano to baths, even though they have to empty and refill her water more than once as she scrubs blood and worse off of herself. She cautions them not to touch the water, and to dispose of it in the earth. As they wash, clothing is laid out for them: surely it belongs to people of this house, but none of it is too fine. It is sturdy clothing, fit for a long journey. Soon there are small packs alongside: bread, cheese, waterskins. A small knife in his, the sort one might use for chores rather than combat. In her pack there is a compass. They are given more than she asked for.
The horses they are eventually led to are fed, with other supplies in saddlebags. They are lovely, strong creatures, though not made for war or for show. They are both young animals, energetic, but calmed quickly when Matilde approaches them, her palm stroking over their faces. They nuzzle at her, both of them, sniffing at her wet and plaited hair, suddenly docile.
As they mount, Matilde looks up once more at the windows, nodding to the man looking down at them. He nods in response. The curtains close.
He forgets he ever knew her. He forgets he ever owed her anything -- or everything. The debt is paid.
BastianoThe man from whom Matilde collects on her first debt is known to Bastiano. It is not that he is particularly well-versed in the important men of the city. It is merely that -- in this city of commerce where a merchant can be a baron, a duke, even a prince in all but name -- the man is so very important. Even a poor soldier from the north who sometimes pretends to be fancier than he is has heard the name and the reputation.
And if he wonders at the spice merchant's deference, if he wonders what debt exactly was owed -- he lets none of it show. He is silent, and watchful, and when they are briefly separated to wash he keeps a weapon close at hand.
No one harms him, though. No one tries. He is, instead, well cared-for. His water is hot and his soap is fragrant. It is a more luxurious bath than he has had in more weeks than he cares to remember. And afterward, bones softened and muscles loosened by the heat, he is given sturdy new clothing; deerskin and wool and linen. He is given provisions, and supplies, and even a knife with which to strike a flint, perhaps, or peel an apple.
When he meets her again outside their bathing-chambers, he is pleased. He takes her hand, not caring is this is unwise, and accompanies her to the stables where they are given yet more supplies, and more importantly, mounts.
Bastiano's knowledge of etiquette may be skin-deep at best, but his knowledge of horseflesh runs to the bone. He mounts up easily, comfortably, reins loose in his hands. His eyes follow Matilde's up to the window. After a beat of pause, he too nods to his benefactor; Matilde's debtor.
The nod is returned. The curtains close. And Bastiano touches his heels to his mount's flank, setting into a loose trot.
"Dare I ask what it is you did for him?" he asks as they depart the house of the spice-merchant.
MatildeThis time, Matilde takes his hand in return. She slips her fingers between his, more intimate than one should in public, but it is the middle of the night and they are, for the moment, alone. Yet even when they pass servants again, she keeps her hand with his.
They did not touch for so long after she woke from her frenzy. She is reluctant to give it up, and wonders if she should have asked for one horse.
But no: this is better. Even if they ride together, one horse can rest a bit. This is wiser. Still, she stands quite near him as he inspects provisions, supplies. Lets go of him only to mount. They ride out quietly after acknowledging the man who is now to forget he ever saw either of their faces, and some distance away Bastiano asks her a question.
She looks over at him, her eyes twinkling faintly, her lips curving as she says: "Murder."
But this is just a tease, a play of hers; a moment after she thinks he believes her, she laughs. Quietly, of course; they are leaving the heart of the city now, heading towards the outskirts, towards poorer areas. "A series of favors to bring him to power and to depose another merchant doing trade on the same routes. A merchant who, to my dismay, was fond of smuggling slaves along that route." A beat. Her eyes are forward, peering through the dark to recall which way she needs to go. "Particularly children, sold for unspeakable purpose. It was a complicated affair that took months, at first, and then years to fully enmesh him in his position."
Her eyes come over to Bastiano. "There was murder involved. He knows not why I chose to aid him, only that everything he has now, he owes to me. I daresay that if I had come tonight and demanded one of his children, he would have considered it a fair price."
BastianoMurder. Bastiano laughs aloud -- which would be a strange reaction indeed, if not for how they began. Their history, brief but already deep.
"How fortunate for him," he remarks, "that you are such a merciful signora."
There's a spark of amusement in his eyes, there. He noticed the honorific.
MatildeColor almost touches her cheeks. She smiles, huffs a laugh, glancing away. She has no words yet for what she feels, how much she wants him to call her that again, how young he makes her feel, how much he reminds her that deep down, she's... good.
But her heart aches tight in her chest, and it says something for the lack of rage and other inner strengths she has right now that tears almost spring to her eyes. She finally finds words, sighing:
"I am so terribly fond of you, mi amore."
Exhales then, like she was holding a breath in. Rides on, taking him to their next errand.
--
They stop at a very small hut, containing far too many people, most of them quite young. One is almost a woman, so close to the verge that there is something awful and vulnerable about her, frightening in its innocence. Matilde dismounts to speak quietly to her, and then crouches down, drawing something in the dirt with her finger. She makes the girl do it, too. If Bastiano watches and knows, he may recognize the glyph of Matilde's tribe. Matilde makes the girl memorize it, and then gives her a few quiet instructions. With some hesitance, the girl leans into her, embracing her. Matilde almost winces, but not from dislike of the touch; she seems almost shamed by the girl's gratitude, and withdraws from the hug a bit too soon. She dusts away the glyphs drawn in the dust and sends the girl back inside.
Mounting, she looks at her companion, saying as she begins to ride again: "She saved my life. Hid me while I was poisoned, hunted." Her eyes go forward again. "She took a beating to protect me. I was young; she was just a little girl."
They ride on. She goes to the friar Bastiano briefly worked with and knew, but he is kin. Between the two of them is less of a debt than a long understanding: his information and his discretion, her protection and patronage. These two do not embrace, but she gives him one last tithe, making him take the gilt-edged compass with the carved wooden case. He can sell it or keep it, as he wishes. She does not need it.
Perhaps that is all, because now they are riding away from Florence, to the roads inland. Except: Matilde stops at a tavern. Smoke doesn't yet rise from the chimney, but there is a man sitting on a stoop outside. He is dark-haired, with a scarred face and a couple of fingers missing on his left hand. He is eating an apple. He appears to be waiting for them. For her, at least: his eyes watch Bastiano carefully.
The man is barrel-chested and very tall, with a long reach to match the sword at his belt. His shoulders are broad, his hair close-cropped, his eyes mostly hidden beneath a scowl. Matilde does not dismount, and clears her throat when the man looks too long at her companion. He drags his gaze off of the strange man with the lady he knows, giving her his attention. A small nod; there is some respect there, at least.
"Tomorrow or the next day, a girl will arrive here. You will know her by the sign she will give you, and the name you are to call her is Matilde. The two of you will go north, into the mountains, to where there are no roads. You must keep going until you hear wolves howling every night."
The man only nods.
"When you have gone that far, one morning you will wake and she will be gone. If she is safe when she is taken, if she is untouched, if she is hale, then your debt to me is paid. But her life is your life. If she has not eaten, if she has been harmed, if any have touched her --"
He interrupts. "I have seen what your kind can do." His tone is gruff; he sounds angry, but only because he does not wish to sound afraid. "I will keep her safe, or I will die."
Matilde gives a small nod to him, and there is silence for a moment before she adds, more softly: "Give my regards to your wife, and to your son, when you see them next."
It seems like there is more between them: more to say, somehow. But neither of them know what those words might be. So she turns to Bastiano, nodding to the road. If he is ready, she is.
BastianoWhen she laughs, turns away almost-blushing,
he allows himself an extra second or three's regard. It feels stolen, forbidden, precious. It feels familiar.
And when she exhales, he reaches out to her, their hands catching and holding in the space between their mounts, their movement. "You know I feel the same," he tells her, softly.
And she does.
--
The little girl, Bastiano watches from a little ways away. He does not wish to frighten her. The world is slowly awakening from the dark ignorance of the past few centuries, but they are still quite a ways from enlightenment, and a strange man on a horse is to be feared by a young girl in a hovel. All the same, he does watch. He does see what it is Matilde draws in the dirt.
He does see the tender, strange little embrace.
And afterward, riding away, she can see -- if she looks -- a flash of tenderness and ache in his eyes. He thinks of her as she describes herself: young, poisoned, hunted. She was dying. There are those who would have taken advantage. The girl did not. The girl suffered to protect her.
It is a debt in truth.
--
Bastiano leaves the friar something of his own: a few coins, but not for their value. Each coin comes from a foreign land. Each coin is defaced by the crude etching of a clenched fist.
"If you go to the fish market by the western docks," he tells the friar, "and spend one of those coins on a fillet of river bass, a man named Cosimo will speak to you. Tell him you knew me. Tell him you saw me heading north, out of Italy, with the woman I love. And if one day you should tire of your life here in the monastery, tell him that as well. And I promise you, he'll find you something to do."
--
At the last stop, again, Bastiano says nothing. But he keeps closer, and he remains astride his horse, and he watches the scarred man with the same distrustful stare he himself receives.
The conversation is held. He does not interrupt. He has his questions. He decides she will tell him one day, or she will not. It is her decision to make.
When they are done, he sets his mount to the road. The night has nearly passed. It is nearly dawn. Their packs are full, their deeds done, their debts paid. She is ready. So is he.
He asks her again the question she's never truly answered. Never dared to, perhaps, for neither of them could foresee whether or not they would survive this long, make it this far:
"Where shall we go now?"
MatildeOne day she will tell him. All of it, really, and in more detail than they had time for in a few hours they spent together in Florence, here and there, or on the ride far out of the city. She'll tell him so many stories about her bisnonna, about her mentor, about the Shadow Lords who found her and reared her. She'll tell him of the years she spent working her way up in Florence. She's a very good storyteller, and often strokes his hair where he lies against her body before falling asleep. Matilde usually stays awake until he sleeps, just as he usually wakes before her, until they grow quite used to it:
seeing her for the last time each day, shadowed and dark,
seeing him for the first time each day, lit by dawn.
But one day she does tell him about the man. She tells him about a battle when she was still in one of those early packs of hers, and how they hunted their quarry to a small farm to find them feasting on the remnants of a young woman, gnawing the bones of her infant son. She tells him that her pack killed the creatures, that they left before the farmer came home from market close to morning, that they did not think the fates of a few humans were their problem to contend with.
It was the first pack she left. She knew it was not her fault, the actions of the Wyrm, the deaths they caused. She knew she didn't owe it to him, anything to him, but she came back to the farm. The farmer had begun to go quite mad. He had not even buried what was left of his family. She watched him for days, watched him starving himself, moaning, howling. It wasn't until he began to cut off his fingers that she intervened. She felt she owed him a debt.
He never saw it that way. As he saw it, a young woman came rushing in one night as he was trying to cut himself to pieces, wrapping his hand in cloth, stopping the bleeding, forcing him to lie down with a strength at odds with her small frame. As he saw it, she brought him back to sanity. She kept him from dying. And then she began to work miracles. She entered his dreams -- his nightmares, really -- and helped him find his way out. She tried to help him bury the -- by now, rotting -- remains of his wife and son, and when he could not, she put him into a dreamless slumber. When he awoke, there were only graves left.
It is hard for Matilde to tell Bastiano all this, because it sounds so much like boasting. Look at all that I did for him, and so on. She clearly still thinks they never should have left him with those bodies. She still thinks the debt was hers, not his. She tells him, one night near the end of finally giving him this story, that it's why it took her so long to collect. It took her years to understand that it didn't matter what she thought of it. He needed to be set free.
But in those years, that farmer learned more and more about his mysterious little savior. That her name was Matilde. That she was not just a miracle worker but a monster. That, when he admitted in one of their dreamwalks that he was filled with a depthless anger and taste for violence he had no place for,
she began to take him hunting. And that is when he saw what she really was, what her kind was really for. That is when he learned to kill, and where to put the horror that had been visited upon him. That is when she realized that he was never going to be fully healed, that there was always going to be a dark crack running through his mind. That is when he realized he could never go back to that farm, even to visit the graves of his family.
"I doubt he ever did," Matilde whispers to Bastiano, a very long time after the fact. "But when he sees them again, in whatever homelands mortals go to --"
It's not a sentence she wants to finish. There are tears in her eyes. After all these years.
--
There are other stories, over the years. How she met the Friar. What, exactly, she did to that other merchant to help her favored one rise to power. And stories not about her at all. She tells him stories she's heard along the way, of myths and tales of bravery. She sings him songs. She started, that night under his ridiculous cow-hide raincover, and she begins again on the road out of Florence. When it rains on them, she starts singing. When thunder answers she laughs. He has to convince her to draw off the road and find cover if only for the sake of the horses.
That night they find an inn, little more than a shack off the side of the road with a few beds separated by curtains, and a stable outside. The beds are so narrow that she sleeps half on top of him, and the lack of privacy is so frustrating that in the morning they leave quickly, ride only a short distance, and make their own small camp in a copse of trees. They have each other twice there, unable to quite stop themselves when it's been so long since the last time. Nearby the horses chuff and stamp gently.
When they put their clothes back on, she chooses to 'rest her horse', or so she says. She rides behind him, her arms around his waist, her cheek against his back.
--
That is days ahead.
Years ahead. With travels and battles. With settling. With moments together that don't have to end because they choose not to end them. Moments apart, sometimes terribly long stretches of time apart because they choose this, too: not to abandon their people. Not to abandon the war. Never to abandon Gaia.
That's not who they are.
--
Today though. A new day, just barely dawning.
The man behind them who has no story yet is going inside the tavern, waiting for the next dark-haired girl named Matilde to come into his life so that he can take care of her, protect her, and repay her namesake. He doesn't think it will heal him. He has stopped waiting for something to heal him. But this is a good thing, he thinks. She gave him a good thing to do. It's different from a hunt. He hopes it is. He'll try to make it so.
The city behind them with a thousand stories and a thousand more to come, begins to wake. It is a city warm and near the water, full of light and art and music and culture and all the things she thought she wanted. It will remain so, for centuries. Within a few decades, one of the greatest artists to ever live will return to Florence to create one of the greatest works of sculpture ever seen. But he is just a little boy now, toddling around, unaware of what he will become, what his hands will do.
The road ahead of them. Always ahead of them, stretching on and on even when the road behind seems so long already.
But Matilde isn't looking at the road. Or the man. Or the city.
She looks at Bastiano. She can never seem to stop looking at him. His cropped hair, his broken nose. His sharp eyes. The lines of his jaw, now overgrown a bit, which she has to admit to herself she likes. His firm hands, which appear heavy and strong but can be shockingly delicate in their various crafts and works. She can see in his eyes that he really does truly want to know the answer this time. Where does she wish to go? Where, really?
It occurs to her to laugh. To admit she doesn't know, she doesn't care, she just wants to be with him, is that silly? Is that childish? Does she seem like a foolish girl, too lovesick to think?
And that's true. She doesn't care where they go. She doesn't care if it makes her silly.
But there's also this: when she looks at him she thinks
family.
She thinks mine.
She thinks:
"Home."
Matilde gives him a small nod. "Take me home. To your family." Softly: "Please."
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