The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato Page A

this deed, and if the Aquila wanted to send a message, it was not Riccardo’s message to send. The dreadful flesh gleamed pale in the moonlight, angelic, not aquiline; in the cruciform almost Christ-like. Sickened, Riccardo turned away from the Panther’s ruined corpse and looked Nello in his eyes. In the moonlight he seemed almost normal – his white hair merely blond, his pink eyes darkened now to an amber hue. Hawk’s eyes, like his father and dead brother.
    ‘What now?’ Riccardo asked.
    ‘Now?’ said Nello, all pretence abandoned. ‘Now you go back where you belong.’ With that he vaulted nimbly down into the tunnel again, pulling the opening closed behind him.
    The sound of stone on stone alerted two officers of the Watch, who had turned a corner into the piazza. Their tricornes were sharks’ fins in the moonlight, the barrels of their pistols gleaming.
    Without hesitation Riccardo made straight for the Palazzo Pubblico for the second time that day, Saint Bernardino’s medallion, IHS, the name of Christ in the sunrays, leading him there like the star of the nativity. His step quickened faster and faster as if it was the ghost of the Panther rather than the Watch who pursued him, and despite the lateness of the hour he hammered fit to wake the dead on the great doors. Sure that no one inside had heeded him, he turned back to face the square: he could not evade the Watch now. But as he looked at the vast moonlit space, he felt the doors open at his back. His last
thought as he plunged into the palace was that Nello had been right. It was the most beautiful place in the world.
     
     
    Pia retired to her chamber as soon as she could, her head aching, reeling from the day she’d had to endure. The wedding feast had held a surprise for her, as if to taunt her further: the unknown horseman whom she had seen at the Palio, the one she had secretly named as her champion. The comparison between him and Nello was even more extreme than it had been between him and Vicenzo, but when she had watched the horseman leave the feast with her new husband, she’d known him for the Eagles’ creature and she damned all three of them in the same breath. Them – and all the men on the earth, including her father: he could burn too. There was no point remonstrating with Salvatore – it was too late for that – but she had begged him at the feast to send on her books and her mother’s clothes. He’d waved away her requests and turned from her to discuss grain quotas with the Eagle capitani . She suspected he had forgotten her words as soon as they were uttered.
    She’d gone up to her chamber after the feast and sat there waiting as the moon rose, with a growing sense of dread. Her bedding had been changed, so Nicoletta would have told Nello that she was undergoing her woman’s courses. She prayed it would be enough to keep him away, even on their wedding night.
    But he came. She heard his step on the stair: dreaded, expected and lighter than Nicoletta’s. When he entered
the room, his hair was disarranged, his pink eyes glittering; he seemed excited. As he came towards her she saw something else glittering – something in his hand.
    A pair of small horse shears.
    Pia was sure she was going to die. She kept quite still, sitting on her bed, while he set about her. But instead of slicing her throat, he began grabbing great chunks of hair and shearing them off. Her beautiful locks fell about her in swags and hanks of blackness on the white coverlet. At first she held her hands over her scalp, trying to protect her hair, but when he sliced at her fingers too, as if he would cut them off, she moved her hands to cover her face instead. The blood from her fingertips seeped into her eyes but she did not care: anything was better than seeing the look on Nello’s face as he chopped at her in a frenzy. She went limp, letting him fling her about and turn her as he would, thinking that only by letting him wear himself out would she