'I suggest you waste no time in passing this on to them. The less we do the less scandal there will be. At the moment only Angelina and this boy . . . and you four are involved. By the time you were finished half of Venice would know all the details and my sister and my house would truly be a laughingstock. I won't have it. Is that clear?'
Both of them looked sulky, wary. Nodded.
'Don't even think of trying to circumvent me,' said Petro quietly. 'I may just have saved your foolish lives. I wonder if Angelina mentioned that this Felluci is the duelist Aldanto's messenger?'
Petro had the satisfaction of seeing the two cousins go abruptly pale.
Chapter 41 ==========
Chiano brooded over the little fire while Sophia grilled fish he'd coaxed into his net for dinner. He thought about how Harrow had slipped away into the marsh so easily he might have been born here; the man made scarcely a rustle in the reeds. What he'd done to mold the creature that had come into his hands into the man now called Harrow had used a smidgeon of magic, a great deal of knowledge he'd gleaned from Sophia about the properties of the plants of the Jesolo, and all his manipulation.
Face the facts, old man, you used him. To protect Marco, yes, but he'd made Harrow into a mere tool for that protection . . .
He was a tool before you got him. He just didn't know it. You gave him that much; self-knowledge. There are those who'd give anything for that.
And there were those who would--and did--give anything to have the luxury of denial, too. He hadn't given Harrow a choice.
How many choices did I have? None, if he was to give Marco a protector. And Marco had to have a protector, if he was to grow into the power the Lion's Shadow promised for him. He was close now, close to accepting the Winged Mantle; Chiano had sensed it. But Marco had to live to grow into that power, and--
And Venice is suddenly a world more dangerous than it was before. And you, old man, aren't there.
Self-knowledge. . . .
He'd had the luxury, not of denial, but of absence of that knowledge for a long time, courtesy of those who had ambushed him in the very corridors of the Accademia, coshed him, and dropped him into a canal. Him! Dottore Marina! And he hadn't even remembered that much until recently! All those experiments with drugs and hallucinations--he knew enough to be able to tell the difference between a real vision and a hallucination--hadn't been to gather the Word of the Goddess. It had been to jar loose his own memories from the confused mist the blow to the head had sent them into.
At first, when he came here, all he'd known for certain was what old Sophia had told him--that the undines had brought him to her, that they had told her he was their friend and that they had rescued him when someone had tried to kill him. They didn't know who; the men had worn steel armor, and that had prevented their magic and his own from saving him. They knew he was a magician, a powerful magician, one who was the friend of water creatures in particular, but that was all they knew. That, and his name, which meant nothing to him as he was, and nothing to an old herb-witch living in the Jesolo.
Sophia had decided--and told him--that he must have some powerful enemy in the city to have earned such treatment, and he had caught fear from her. For the longest time he hadn't wanted to know; it seemed safer when he didn't. And he particularly didn't want to use magic. Sophia had told him that magicians could tell where other magicians were using magic, and even who it was that was doing it--as if there would be any other magician in the Jesolo!
But when nothing happened, and no one came seeking him, then he dared, a little at a time. He dared first a little magic, a very little magic, something that he remembered bits of, that Sophia knew bits of, to call the undines to him. And it worked; they came out of friendship more than anything else, but stayed because he could feed them tidbits of power out of his own stores. It was the undines who came often enough for his tidbits and stayed to chase fish into his traps. It was the undines, also, who frightened the locos sufficiently, with their clawed hands and shark-tooth smiles, that he and Sophia were left unmolested. They could even, at need, make dangerous locos like the late Big Gianni feel threatened enough that he could have made Big Gianni back off from Marco if he'd been there when it needed doing.
And finally he tried getting those memories back of who, exactly, Dottore Marina was, and what he could do.
'Here,' Sophia said, nudging him. 'Better eat.'
He accepted the piece of grilled fish from her and ate it mechanically.
* * *
It was a good thing that it was the memories of danger that came back first, and not the ones he had just gotten over the last few days, or his enemies would have surely found him. Someone had paid for very, very skilled bravos, dressed head-to-foot in fine chain mail, to ambush him within the Accademia itself. His defensive magics,
