The Hounds of God by Judith Tarr

Author:Judith Tarr [Tarr, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MOBI, medieval, The Hounds of God, ebook, Pope Honorius, nook, Judith Tarr, fantasy, Rome, historical, Book View Cafe, kindle, thirteenth century, EPUB, Hound and the Falcon
ISBN: 9781611381825
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2012-07-03T22:11:14+00:00

24.

Now he would do it. Now he would tell her. Now she would know what he was.

Nikki made a litany of it, striding blindly through streets grown familiar, as oblivious to both marvels and commonplaces as any Roman born. His nose and his feet between them took him past the tavern to the scrivener’s shop.

There his feet would go no farther. He could not mount the stair. He could only stare into the shop, realizing very slowly that the pale gleam within was candlelight on Uncle Gregorios’ bald head. The scribe was at work over a heap of documents.

“Behind again,” he said by way of greeting, “thanks to all the uproar with the marriage contracts. Did you hear? No? Herminia Capelli was to marry Pietro Brentano, which was much to the advantage of both families, and which was very much to the taste of the bridal couple. But she was a widow with a young son, and there were properties settled on her on the boy’s behalf; and someone somewhere had found an irregularity in the contract of that first marriage, which affected the inheritance and possibly the legitimacy of the union itself. Now if the marriage was improperly sealed and the boy improperly conceived...”

Gregorios’ words washed over Nikki, sharp yet soothing, demanding nothing but a nod now and then. Nikki moved about the cramped confines of the shop, attacked a sheet of parchment with pumice until it took on the sheen of raw silk, trimmed the pens laid in a box for the purpose, scraped smooth the wax tablets Gregorios used for jottings and for teaching the pupils who came to him in the mornings to learn a little Greek.

One tablet bore nothing but row on row of staggering alphas; in spite of himself Nikki smiled. New pupil, surely. He almost regretted the stroke that smoothed the tablet into waxy anonymity.

The voice had stopped. Gregorios, with his usual finesse, had ended tale and document together; he held a stick of wax to the candle’s flame, gathering each scarlet droplet on the bottom of the parchment. Nikki set in his hand the heavy notary’s seal; he nodded his thanks.

There was little in his face to suggest his kinship with Stefania. He was a little shorter than Nikki, neither fat nor thin, with a square-cut face and a strong blunt nose. As if to make up for the bareness of his head, his brows were thick and black and long enough to curl, beetling over the sudden blue gleam of his eyes; and his beard, though sheared short, sprang forth with a will and a vigor all its own.

He looked mildly alarming, yet somehow, like Stefania, he struck Nikki with his perfect rightness. He could not be other than he was.

For a witch’s fosterling, Nikki was dismayingly forgetful of the power of names. Even as he named her in his mind she was there, holding back the curtain that concealed the inner stair, regarding them with a total lack of surprise.

Her

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