A confit orange peel, fragrant and faintly bitter, rested on Niccolò’s tongue. Alessandro Volterra’s gratitude, offered moments before for Niccolò’s discreet revision of the Volterra family’s old cadastral maps, had been utterly insincere. It hung in the cool air of the scriptorium, a silken promise, hollow at its core.
Yet, Alessandro had inclined his head, a gesture of almost regal deference, and a brief, almost imperceptible curl of his lips had suggested a blow of a kiss, a private jest between them. Niccolò, watching him, merely pressed his teeth against the peel, the meaningless act anchoring him. A tremor ran through his thighs, the awkward, adolescent flutter of feelings he couldn’t quite name, much less master.
The candied peel, now softened, lay forgotten on the carved oak desk. Niccolò, chewing idly on a new piece of sugared ginger, replayed the unsettling exchange with Alessandro. He knew precisely why it felt so wrong, a truth he refused to acknowledge. It hovered, palpable without touch, a clammy mist clinging to his thoughts.
He twirled the ginger between his fingers.
Was Alessandro truly aligned with Giorgio Barone? Giorgio, who had squandered his inheritance on card games and tavern brawls, now a mere hanger-on for any noble willing to toss him a few scudi. Marco Rossi, son of a successful dye merchant, was much the same. Whether Giorgio, Marco, or even that fool Filippo Contarini, their lives followed a depressingly familiar trajectory. A grotesque predictability.
“My inkpot, gone! Who took it?” Marco Rossi’s bellow shattered the measured quiet of the scriptorium.
He paid no mind to the serious young scholars bent over their parchments. Other students, lesser sons of lesser houses, ignored him in turn. Giorgio Barone, a lanky youth with eyes too close together, punched Marco’s arm.
“The scudi you owe me could buy a dozen such paltry things!”
“Ah! My ink!”
The far corner of the chamber dissolved into a clamor of shouts and scuffles. Marco and Giorgio wrestled, oblivious to the displeased glances from the front rows. Niccolò saw the Maestro, Giovanni, purse his lips, then sigh.
“That one grows tiresome.”
The murmur, carried on a draft, was Alessandro’s. Niccolò looked up. Their eyes met across the polished wood, a flash of something unreadable in Alessandro’s dark gaze as he leaned back in his chair.
Niccolò held his breath.
Without warning, Alessandro reached out, his movements slow and deliberate. Niccolò’s gaze fixated on Alessandro’s perfectly manicured nails, the clean, pale crescents. He sat rigid as those long, elegant fingers, like curious serpents, twined around the candied ginger stick at Niccolò’s lips.
Alessandro pulled gently. The sticky-sweet ginger scraped Niccolò’s teeth, a brief, intimate slide across his tongue, then, with a soft pop, it was gone from his mouth.
“I shall relish this,” Alessandro murmured, a faint smile playing on his lips.
He licked his lips slowly, fastidiously, as if cleaning them. Then, with a low laugh, he asked, “Why?”
Alessandro often laughed. But his laughter rarely held the lightheartedness his humor suggested.
“It is… unhygienic,” Niccolò managed, his voice stiff.
“Do you not know, Niccolò? A shared bite, a curious intimacy, builds a certain… resilience. Fends off the humors.” Alessandro’s eyes glinted with amusement. He placed a hand on his thigh, sweeping upwards to his knee, arching his back. Niccolò curled his fingers, burying them in his palm, hiding their sudden trembling.
He knew. He knew he was a fool for letting this continue.
Alessandro, still leaning askew, his hand resting on his knee, casually popped the remainder of the ginger into his mouth. He shrugged.
“You said you preferred candied lime?”
He sucked on the sweetmeat with a languid grace. Air whistled faintly between his lips. A surprisingly ordinary gesture for Alessandro Volterra’s refined mouth.
“That was bergamot,” Niccolò corrected quietly.
“Then it is fine. I find bergamot quite agreeable.”
Alessandro, with utterly infuriating skill, continued to consume the sweetmeat Niccolò had just been holding.
---
Another day waned. Autumn’s breath grew sharper, carrying the tang of coming winter. The clear blue sky above Volterra, once vibrant, now felt vast and heavy. Maestro Giovanni and the other instructors at the Ducal Academy impressed upon the students the grave duty to make their mark. Yet, exceptions always existed.
Filippo Contarini, Marco Rossi, Giorgio Barone, excluded from the hallowed ranks of the ‘model scholars,’ were like discardable pawns. Their antics served only to highlight the seriousness of others. Over time, the chastisements for their wanderings softened, interest in their misdeeds waned. The only difference was Filippo. His father’s once-storied lineage still held just enough weight to make Filippo a persistent nuisance.
The truly pitiable one was Lorenzo Ricci. If only he hadn’t become entangled with Filippo, he might have found patronage in a respectable guild, or perhaps even a place in the Duke’s library. Or if only his grandmother hadn’t fallen so ill, requiring all his family’s meager funds.
Niccolò, however, had long ago decided to ignore all happenings outside his carefully constructed sphere. This was the wisest decision for his precarious life.
He lived thus, until the day he could no longer avoid the inevitable.
Everything held the potential for disruption. Especially a fool like Filippo Contarini, who seemed to accelerate his path to such potential without any discernible plan.
Filippo Contarini returned to the scriptorium.
---
Niccolò clicked his tongue softly.
He saw Filippo, slumped over a desk at the front, through the barely ajar antechamber door. Filippo’s father had finally located him, Niccolò had overheard. It was an awkward return, nearly twenty days after his last truancy. If one was to abscond, one might as well venture into the remote countryside. Niccolò wondered why Filippo lingered within such easy reach, almost begging to be found.
Niccolò tapped his fingers against the polished wood of the antechamber frame. Entering now felt deeply uncomfortable.
His gaze drifted to the back of Filippo’s head. A few strands of his thick, dark hair stood rebelliously upright. Niccolò remembered a time when he would, under the guise of casual camaraderie, occasionally smooth them down. The memory felt distant, blurred, a relic. He decided to sever any lingering attachment. He turned to descend the steps.
This academy was a place of countless watchful eyes. Even a simple conversation with Filippo would spawn rumors: *Niccolò Moretti and Filippo Contarini, seen speaking alone.* These whispers would inflate, distort. The worst scenario? Filippo, in a fit of pique, striking him again. The thought of such a public humiliation was intolerable.
The best possible outcome, Filippo ignoring him, was a gamble Niccolò was too prudent to take. The wisest choice was to eliminate the bad situation entirely, unseen. So, he returned to the ground floor, loitering near the shoe racks until, ten minutes before the final call for morning lessons, he blended into the influx of students. Only then did he find his seat, his maps and quills ready.
He cultivated an air of utter disinterest in anything concerning Filippo. Or rather, he diligently hid his significant interest. His efforts, he believed, were paying off.
Yet, Filippo remained his greatest variable. Frustration and a faint disgust prickled at him. *Damn it.* Discomfort and a quiet anxiety gradually consumed his composure, emotions that intensified after Alessandro Volterra swept into the scriptorium.
Alessandro approached Filippo with an unnerving casualness, even offering a pleasant greeting.
“It has been some time, Contarini, has it not?”
The friendly tone felt so absurd it stunned Niccolò. For a moment, curiosity overshadowed his anxiety. He looked up. Alessandro stood with his satchel slung over one shoulder, a broad, unsettling smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. Filippo merely grunted, a curt nod his only response.
“Such a cold reception. What a pity.”
Alessandro nudged Filippo’s desk with his foot. An inappropriate gesture, considering it was Alessandro who had orchestrated Filippo’s fall from grace within the academy’s social order. Not wanting to involve himself in such petty matters, Niccolò forced his attention back to the ‘real’ problems laid out on his desk, his cartographic problems. The effort was futile. Maestro Giovanni entered for morning roll call.
The Maestro seemed genuinely pleased by Filippo’s return. A clear vein of guilt marked his mention of Lorenzo’s continued absence. What a timid, fragile man the Maestro was.
“Lorenzo is not with us today, either,” he murmured, almost to himself, the words pregnant with unspoken meaning. He tapped the attendance book on his desk, a final, soft punctuation.
What followed occurred quicker than expected.
Filippo grimaced, rummaging through his desk drawer for his drafting parchment, its state clearly filthy. A couple of students, whose own materials were safely stowed in the academy’s secure lockers, raised their hands and excused themselves. Filippo’s expression darkened as they departed.
Since he rarely studied, the actual tools likely held little importance for him. The true affront for Filippo, sensitive as he was to hierarchy and perceived slights, was that items bearing his name had been defiled or removed. Everyone in the scriptorium knew the truth, yet by unspoken accord, no one uttered a word. Not about who had ruined Filippo’s precious atlas, nor about who had instigated it.
“Who did this?”
As soon as the class ended, the moment everyone had unconsciously anticipated began.
“I asked, who did this?”
Filippo, hands jammed into his breeches pockets, chin lifted, demanded answers. Those who abhorred conflict slipped from the chamber. Those intrigued glanced around, their eyes darting. In that charged atmosphere, Alessandro, holding a thoroughly dirty, almost unrecognizable stylus, its handle caked with finger marks, scribbled something nonchalantly in a small vellum-bound textbook. Then he spoke, his voice unconcerned.
“What are you speaking of, Contarini?”
“Who?”
“Who what? You must articulate your grievances if you wish them to be understood.”
The audacity was staggering. Truly brazen.
“The cur who threw away all my instruments.”
Filippo knew his instruments hadn’t vanished by chance. His animal-like sensitivity to status and insult would confirm it. Alessandro’s failure to answer ‘who’ implicitly acknowledged complicity. Even a fool would grasp this. Yet, Alessandro continued to jest, feigning ignorance of the gravity.
“Did you even possess instruments, Contarini? I recall only your sprawled form, lost to slumber.”
See? There he went again, laughing needlessly. There was no way Filippo would let that slide.
“Enough, Volterra! Was it you, Moretti?”
And naturally, Niccolò was implicated. This was as predictable as the tide. “...No,” Niccolò said, his voice clipped.
In that chamber, no one was more volatile or less refined than Filippo Contarini, who constantly stumbled into foolish errors. He must have felt his precipitous decline acutely, every glance, every space in the room, holding the weight of memory and emotion. Yet, they, the observers, pretended nothing untoward had happened.
“Come now, would our diligent Moretti defile his beloved instruments in such a fashion? He venerates maps, not destroys them.”
“Alessandro—damn you, why do you constantly interfere?”
“Interfere? If a kinsman faces injustice, it is only right to offer counsel.” Alessandro’s voice was smooth, almost bored.
“What the hell are you talking about, moron?”
“Moron? That is a rather harsh assessment, Contarini.”
“Stop your bullshitting. Who else here could have stirred such a cesspool of ill-will in my absence, if not you two?”
Filippo scoffed. Only then did Alessandro set his stylus down on the desk. His lips still held a slight, mocking smirk. Filippo’s face twisted in displeasure. Unable to contain his anger, Filippo seized a nearby leather satchel. He hurled it. Unfortunately, it struck Niccolò squarely in the chest.
“Ah!”
It wasn’t particularly painful; the satchel was not heavily laden. But the sudden impact was startling. Niccolò frowned, watching the satchel tumble to his knees.
“This crude oaf resorts to throwing objects now.”
Before Niccolò could speak, Alessandro interjected. His voice was already laced with annoyance. At that moment, Filippo slowly lifted the corners of his mouth.
“Ah, I see.”
It was the look of someone who believed he had won. *What did he think he understood?* Niccolò’s furrowed brow refused to relax.
“Alessandro. Moretti. You conspire?”
Niccolò was at a complete loss for words. Alessandro’s playful smirk vanished instantly, replaced by a genuine bewilderment that quickly morphed back into mockery. Niccolò felt more bewildered than Filippo, who had lost his instruments. It seemed Alessandro felt the same.
“Contarini, forgive me, but your words are so crudely formed, I find myself quite unable to grasp their meaning.”
Despite clearly hearing every syllable, Alessandro placed his palm near his ear, a blatant gesture of derision. From Niccolò’s observations, Alessandro rarely stopped at a single jest. This was merely the overture to a deeper provocation. Sensing the uneasy air, Niccolò stood. Meanwhile, Alessandro slowly extended his pinky finger.