“Barbarigo.” I stated his name.
My adversary wheeled, still drunk with love. I have known I must fight him since we first came face-to-face, I thought, face-to-face again. Duel him, duel him. The demands of seven years drummed in my head. Mask to mask at Carnival in Foscari’s hall I had confronted him. Sofia Baffo had hardly been able to choose between us. Fate had chosen then; today it would again.
Barbarigo dropped his hands from their post-coital fussing with sash and codpiece. By God, I would have him dead. He stared at the come-on wink of my dagger as if with long-lost recognition.
“What?” he said, then stopped. He knew; every man recognizes death’s angel.
He bolted suddenly. I’d fully expected him to. Though weighted down by my eunuch’s skirts, I was upon him in a moment. I caught him by the sash and flung him hard against the wall of a coppersmith’s shop. The burnished wares clanged together like a kitchen in full smoke and his new-wound turban tumbled to the ground, releasing his eunuch-like Western curls once more. I rammed my dagger through the foppish brocade under his left arm. His liquid brown eyes—I could see my beardless self in them—winced as the point of my blade stopped somewhere between skin and rib.
Shopmen retreated into their back rooms. No one in Constantinople would lift a finger to stop a eunuch with his dagger bared. When the deed was done, they would reemerge and quietly set things in order again, merely muttering “honor” among themselves with awe rather than anger. To pry more into the matter would be decided bad taste—or decidedly dangerous.
I slipped my blade, wicking blood to the hilt, through Barbarigo’s flesh, off the rib and down, until the next thing it found would be his heart. And yet I couldn’t drive it home. We stood eye to eye, panting in each other’s exhausted breath.
“You—” Barbarigo swallowed and tried again, almost smiling with the pleasure to find each word was not his last. “You are the khadim who first brought me to her.”
I drew my arm back for the lunge at such a lie.
“You are,” he insisted. “Didn’t you come, telling me she’d borne a son and wanted a priest for him?”
I couldn’t deny it. And if I acted now upon my impulse, would my part in all of this be exposed?
Barbarigo had been speaking Turkish to this point. I switched to Venetian, for he could not recognize me as I did him and would have no reason to switch on his ovm. The croon of our mothers’ tongue took him as much by surprise as the point of my blade, warmed by his own blood. But suddenly, irrationally, I wanted him to know.
“That was not the beginning, Barbarigo. Not the beginning at all. Do you remember me now? My voice, at least, from behind a carnival mask. My voice which, against all nature, hasn’t changed in the intervening years. It was I, Barbarigo, who thwarted your attempt to elope with the lady that January evening so long ago. It was I, in the Foscari’s hall. I, Giorgio Veniero. And you—” I laughed in spite of myself at the mercy it would have been. “You threatened to turn me in to your father.”
My adversary’s face paled as if I’d hit an artery, though, by my life, I’d as yet given him no more than a scratch.
“Yes, I—I remember,” he stammered. “I—I haven’t forgotten—nor forgiven—in all these years.”
“Nor I, Barbarigo. Nor I. Though, by my life, I wish I’d let her go with you. I pray to heaven you had taken her out of my life, to give me my life again.”
Barbarigo shifted. I refocused the attention of my blade, so he would not think emotion had weakened my resolve.
But then I realized I did not truly want him dead. Neither his life nor his death presented any threat to me or my two ladies at all. If I’d turned and walked away from the chink in the tradesman’s wall, refusing to get involved in Safiye’s machinations, we would have remained safe, too. But now she had drawn me into her maelstrom once again. Who knew where it would end? And who knew what effect this could have on my lady and her tiny, precious daughter? Evil was the only word that came to mind.
I could not escape the thought that this was how Baffo’s daughter had planned it all along. Once again I was playing her dupe. I had hoped, even prayed, that what I had suffered in that castrator’s dim little house in Pera had freed me of the spell the sight of her cast on every being in the world. Now rationality glimmered in the back of my mind: The haze of jealousy I’d been laboring through for the past hour was not the way to peace in my life.
My rashness might even bring harm to Esmikhan and Gul Ruh.
I would rather, I admitted in the brute part of my brain, turn this dagger on myself. And if I no longer stood on watch for my ladies, certainly they would suffer. At the very least, I would suffer without sight of them, unable to watch the daily miracle of their lives.
Who benefited if I cleansed the glistening life from young Barbarigo’s eyes, purified the air we panted together? Neither the empire nor Murad, my lady’s brother, whose honor was most at stake here. Only she. Only the almonds-dredged-in-poison-eyed daughter of Baffo. She who orchestrated everything. The only safety—I remembered this now—was far from her sight. To kill her lover was not the way to lie low.
Barbarigo read the hesitation in my eyes and attempted a half smile to encourage it. I took the look as a
