02 Court of Wolves by Robyn Young

Author:Robyn Young
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781444777796
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2018-08-08T23:00:00+00:00

The sun warmed her face as she stood on the terrace, eyes tracing the now familiar skyline of disorderly tenements, immense palazzi and crenellated towers. The dome of the cathedral was the colour of dried blood in the afternoon light. Feeling a shadow pass across her, Amelot turned, gaze on the door that led into the room she shared with Jack. It remained closed and, seeing no further movement, she guessed the shadow had been a bird. But as she returned her attention to the city she felt a prickle at her back.

Again, last night, she had heard someone moving around the top floor. She’d been aware of movement out there before at odd times, usually deep in the dark before dawn when everyone was asleep – the click of a door, the creak of a stair, a faint odour of unfamiliar sweat tainting the air. She thought at first it must be servants or Lorenzo’s bodyguards on patrol, but that seemed odd when it was only their room, a library, a couple of storerooms and an armoury on the upper floor. Twice now, she had crept out to investigate, but had seen no one.

Jack didn’t seem to have noticed these intrusions, his mind elsewhere. At least now he appeared to be focused on the hunt for Amaury again, since he’d gone to meet the men of the Court of Wolves, asking the others to help her in her search and telling her he hoped there would soon be an opportunity for her to get a look at the company – see if she could spot the man she’d glimpsed at Carnival.

Amelot set off across the terrace to the adjoining building. Jumping up, she grabbed the overhang of the roof and pulled herself on to it. The tiles were sun-warm under her bare feet as she crossed the expansive roof of the palace of Lorenzo’s cousins, then scrambled across the next one, launching a flock of birds into the sky.

Beads of sweat broke out on her brow as she moved, eyes alert, scanning rotting balconies and expansive loggias where washing waved like flags, peering through attic windows curtained with webs and between the gaps of shutters. It was too early to venture inside any of the buildings. That she would only risk at night. In this way she had seen many of the city’s secrets.

She had seen wonders. A shadowed workshop filled with masks, rows of painted heads, horned devils and gilded dragons lined up like an audience. Men tipping cauldrons of dye into the Arno that had turned the river pink. A marble giant chiselled to life in a cellar. And she had seen horrors. A girl dragged into an alley by three men, her screams stopped by a brutal hand. A tonsured friar rutting like a dog with a dead-eyed boy with painted lips in a brothel. A woman smothering her crying baby. A slave’s brown back lashed to bloody ribbons by her master’s whip.

She had seen arguments

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