Isabelle puffed a noise of disbelief before her math skills caught up to her. “Well, that was hundreds of generations ago. If her children had children and they survived, she must have thousands of descendants by now.”
“Yes. I believe every single living Sanguinaire is related to her by some degree, but you are her only living direct maternal descendant. She had two sons and one daughter, who took her name, as was their tradition. The younger Céleste in turn bore a daughter, and so on and so forth down through the millennia, to your grandmother to your mother to you.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Isabelle said, thrilled and appalled at the same time. To think that she was the direct descendant of an ancient heroine was like a childhood fantasy come true. In stories, such omens and portents always came complete with some grand destiny. But to think that Kantelvar actually believed such nonsense cast doubt upon his sanity. “It’s been two thousand years, genealogies get fabricated, people are unfaithful, women are raped—”
“But blood will out,” Kantelvar said. He hefted a small chest onto the crowded table, extracted from it an ornate rod about the size of her finger, and presented it to her.
A tingle of excitement ran up her spine. It was clearly a quondam artifact; shadows played beneath its metallic skin, as if the metal itself had a pulse. She’d never so much as touched such a prize before. Gingerly she took it. It was warm to her skin and heavy as gold. One end was tipped with a bulb the size of her thumb joint and the other with a half loop about the same size. The shaft was covered in rows of characters that seemed to be extruded from the surface. One row read “Isabelle des Zephyrs” in the Saintstongue. The others were all in strange characters that Isabelle did not recognize.
Seeing her name on this odd trinket made all the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “What is this? And what is it supposed to prove?”
“It is a blood cipher, and it will tell you your lineage,” Kantelvar said. “Just press the round end to your thumb?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how it works.”
Isabelle wavered. She did not trust Kantelvar, but he clearly wanted her alive and in good health to have Julio’s children. He could not simply make her disappear, and she’d never used a quondam artifact before.
Curiosity took the reins before reason had worked out all the details, and she touched the tip of the thing to the pad of her thumb.
It stung her, sharp and hard. She yelped and tossed the rod away. The cylinder arced across the room, caromed off a pillar, and rolled under the table. A dot of blood welled up from her thumb.
“What did it do?” she gasped, her pulse racing with fear. “Poison?”
“Not at all,” Kantelvar said, lurching around the table to retrieve the fallen device. “It just needs a drop of your blood to decipher. A man’s seed is a special form of blood that carries the spark of life into a woman’s womb. It mixes with her blood, half to half. This admixture precipitates from the mother’s body to form the child. The child is therefore half its mother and half its father.”
He gave the blood cipher’s head a twist and plunked it down on the table. Instantly it set up a high-pitched whirring hum. Seams opened up in its sides and it sprouted four insectile legs. From inside the crate came an answering buzz, and dozens of blood ciphers scuttled out. The swarm converged on the blood cipher bearing Isabelle’s name and all the metallic bugs crawled over one another, touching tips and tails in a boiling hive.
Isabelle edged closer, sucking her pricked thumb.
Suddenly one of the bugs reoriented itself to the vertical and all the other bugs swarmed up it, branching out two by two until it formed a tree over a meter tall. A family tree. Kantelvar leaned in and stared at the base. “This is you … yes. Just as I thought. And this is your mother and your grandmother.” He traced her lineage back through five generations of mothers.
“And if you activate this one,” he said excitedly, pointing at her three-times-great-grandmother Giselle, “it goes back five more generations, and so on until we get back one hundred three generations to Saint Céleste herself.”
Isabelle marveled at the device—what a magnificent machine—almost as much as the information it so elegantly displayed. She leaned in close to get a look at how the ciphers hooked up to one another—how in the world did they communicate?—and read her name again, only more information had been added: Isabelle des Zephyrs, l’étincelle.
Isabelle was not given to fainting fits, but this made her dizzy. This had to be wrong. She was unhallowed. She most surely did not possess l’étincelle, Saint Céleste’s power to breathe life into the lifeless.
Impossible. She very nearly blurted the word aloud, but Kantelvar didn’t know she could read Saintstongue.
She quickly followed the branch up to her mother: Vedetta des Zephyrs, Sanguinaire, and her father … Her father? The man listed as her father was Lorenzo Barbaro, Fenice.
Isabelle’s mouth dropped open and her blood ran cold with shock and disbelief. Surely Kantelvar had to know it was wrong. Unless it wasn’t.
Assume it’s true. She was more than happy not to be related to the cruel and vicious Comte des Zephyrs, but who in all the world was Lorenzo Barbaro? The Fenice ruled the city-states of Vecci. She had never met one, but she had seen paintings of men and women clad in brilliant feathers, like scale armor, each one sporting an elaborate mask of feathers and a great crest of plumage on their head. They were said to be stronger than a team of oxen and tough enough to survive grapeshot unscathed.
Was Lorenzo Barbaro still alive? Did he know of Isabelle’s existence? Did she have any other siblings? Did her father … le Comte des Zephyrs know he had been duped? He would have killed her for sure … or would he?
What if creating Isabelle for Kantelvar’s conspiracy had been the deal from the very beginning? What if the comte had known from the start that he was to raise a cuckoo? His contempt for her needed no explanation—he was cruel to everyone—but it would explain why no other match had ever been made for her, why there had never been talk of a nunnery, of getting rid of her for any price. She was already spoken for. And from there it was not hard to guess what her father had gotten in return. The name des Zephyrs, the rank, and the title all came with the skyland, and that had been his wife’s dowry. And if there was one thing Kantelvar and his ilk seemed to be good at, it was brokering marriages.
“Is something the matter?” Kantelvar asked.
Isabelle stiffened. He hadn’t meant to show her this. He hadn’t announced her supposed sorcery or her paternity. He wanted to show her, but he didn’t want her to know.
Her mouth dry as dust, she asked, “Can it do this for anyone?”
“It can track anyone for whom it has a sample to compare.”
“So it had to have samples from both my parents?”