OCYRHOE KNEW THE general layout of the Orsini palazzo. When the man she’d been following passed the pair of guards at the gate, she knew where on the back wall she could slip unseen into the grounds. There was enough moonlight to spot the shadows made by handholds on the rough stone wall. She climbed the wall, hung off the other side, and dropped into the shadows. An ancient apple tree leaned drunkenly toward the main house, and she clambered up its sprawling branches until she could leap lightly to the roof of the main building. The master of the house—Orsini, the Bear of Rome—usually met his visitors in a large room that looked out over the terraced ponds in the back. The moon was high in the sky, round and gravid, and its pale light revealed the long expanse of the city that lay below Orsini’s estate.
The roof here was well maintained, the tiles firmly interconnected, making it easy to move quickly and quietly. Ocyrhoe scampered like a squirrel across the angled peak of the roof, past the rim of stones that lay around the hearth’s smoke hole, and then launched herself at the stone railing of the balcony above.
A pair of lions, one on each front corner of the balcony, rose out of the worn stone balusters, mouths wide in frozen roars. Their backs and rears vanished into the railing, but the sculptors had carved every detail of their heads, chests, and forelegs, down to their clawed feet. Ocyrhoe grabbed one of the lions’ open mouths, her hands wrapping around its stony lower jaw, and her feet swung, scrabbled for a moment, and then found the top of the lion’s claws. She pressed herself against the granite beast, trying to catch her breath. She hadn’t stopped moving since this afternoon. Not since she had leaped onto the back of that horse.
The rest of the day had been a whirlwind. The strange sensation of flying as she clung to the hairy foreigner and his horse. The earthy smell of the young man. The soldier’s blade and the foreigner’s knife. The stone in her hand and how much it hurt her palm when she smashed the soldier’s head with it. The stranger’s alien language, a lilting song that was frustratingly familiar yet completely incomprehensible. His name—Ferenc—which he repeated over and over and over again until she figured out what he was trying to tell her. How immediately he fell asleep once she found a safe place for them to hide.
She had tried to lie down too, but her body was too wound up. Too much energy coursing through her. Too much she didn’t know. As much as she hated to leave the young man by himself, she couldn’t sit there and watch him all night. She had to find out what had happened to the priest.
That mystery hadn’t taken long to solve. An inn near the Porta Tiburtina market was still reliving the incident from that afternoon when she slipped in. The stories being bandied about the smoke-filled room were outrageous, and more than one storyteller was arguing that his version was the true one because he had been there. I saw it with my own eyes! This is the way it happened! The only thing all the tales had in common was the whispered destination of the priest: Septizodium.
A clink of metal—like a knife against a plate, or a decanter against a cup—returned her attention to her moonlit surroundings. Ocyrhoe shifted her weight and found a place for her foot on the curve of the lion’s shoulder. She pushed herself up so that she could see over the edge of the balcony’s railing. The balcony was long, running nearly the length of this side of the palazzo, and there was a set of double doors off to her left. Directly in front of her was a window. Its shutters were open, letting out light and sound; her line of sight wasn’t very good, but she could hear voices. Two men, she guessed, though she couldn’t make out their words.
She pushed up more and got an elbow on the top of the railing. The muscles in her arms protested as she pulled her body up. She was getting perilously close to complete exhaustion; she wouldn’t be able to do much more running and climbing before her body gave out. As quietly as possible, she slipped over the railing and hid in the shadows along the side of the house.
Inside, a line of oil lamps hanging along the inner wall created dancing patterns of illumination—gloom and half-light. A wooden table sat in the center of the room, and there were two stools placed nearby. There were indeed two men: one standing, one sitting. The man she had followed was sitting, eating; the other man was the Bear.
The Bear—Matteo Rosso Orsini—watched his visitor eat. Orsini was a big man, prone to wearing big robes—even in this heat—and his smooth face was ruddy in the firelight. Ocyrhoe had seen him laugh once, and the sight had terrified her. He’d thrown his head back and opened his mouth wide, and she couldn’t help but think of a snake unhinging its jaws to swallow its prey. But what had really terrified her was all the teeth. His mouth seemed to be filled with more teeth than the human head should possibly hold. And his laugh. It came from deep in his belly—a roiling sound of thunder.
“All this way for a plate of meat.” Orsini shook his head, bemused by the way the other man attacked his plate. “Perhaps I should offer to provide more food for your friends.”
The man from the Septizodium paused, his tongue touching a blot of grease on his lower lip. “No,” he said. “I don’t want them to become comfortable.”
“What of you? Are you going to sneak out every night to feast at my table? That isn’t wise. Someone will see you eventually, someone we don’t control. They will talk to the wrong people, and—”
“The city isn’t yours?”