“A child accepts drawings from anyone with a pouch of candied chestnuts, Signor Veracini,” Sabia said, her tone cool and level as she plucked the yellowed scrap from his hand. “And a beaten dog forgets who tossed it scraps once the cage door locks.”
Orsino did not reach to take it back. His hand hovered in the drafty air between them, palm curving inward before dropping to his side. “I looked for you across the Rialto for five years, Sabia. You simply vanished into that palazzo.”
“I did not vanish. I was put behind an attic shutter and handed a shuttle.” She slipped the sketch into her pocket, beside the small iron key. Her pulse drummed against her ribs, demanding caution. Kindness in this floating city always carried a price tag, usually written in an unpayable currency. “If your hospitality depends on sentimentality, tell me now. I can sleep under the colonnades of the fish market.”
Orsino examined her face, reading the stiff posture, the defensive angle of her chin. A bitter, melancholy smile touched the edge of his mouth. “The studio in Palazzo Veracini is yours. No debts owed, no childhood accounts settled. Work, Sabia. That is all I ask.”
Pippin trotted from the shadow of a splintered crate, rubbing his sleek, gray-tipped muzzle against Sabia’s skirts before leaping onto Orsino’s traveling chest with an arrogant purr. The beast knew neither gratitude nor fear; Sabia envied him.
By midnight, she was ensconced in the west wing of Orsino’s estate, surrounded by high marble arches and the lap of dark canal water outside tall leaded panes. A fire crackled in the hearth, throwing embers toward the heavy timber ceiling.
Sabia did not sleep. She spread the ink-stained ledger beneath the yellow glow of tallow.
Her own past hand had left a spiderweb of calculations across page forty-two. Ciphered margins. Dates matching the Moretti accounts. And, underlined twice in crushed indigo ink: *The Saffron-Gall fraud.*
Years ago, Bettina had forced Sabia to dye thread for Lucrezia’s grand wall-hanging using cinnabar and poached saffron-gall—a toxic, banned mordant smuggled from the Ottoman ports. It produced a luminous, unnatural carmine that stayed bright beneath candlelight, an illusion that won Lucrezia her first burst of acclaim among the salon elites. The Guild of Dyers and Weavers strictly forbade its use under penalty of public disbarment and heavy fines; the fumes rotted the lungs of apprentices.
Sabia traced the chemical proportions written in her youthful, desperate script with her thumb. Her past self had noted every shipment, every crate number marked with Bettina’s private seal, right down to the cellar bin where the remaining powder lay buried.
“You wanted my work,” Sabia murmured into the empty room, looking toward the distant silhouette of the Moretti family towers. “Now you will own its consequences.”
Before dawn, an urchin slipped a sealed packet across the doorstep of Syndic Corbetta, the most fastidious inspector in the guild registry. Inside was no frantic accusation, only receipts: harbor manifests, warehouse tallies, and the exact recipe of the toxic fixative found in Lucrezia’s celebrated pastoral hanging currently displayed in the guild’s main arcade.
The strike landed at midday.
Sabia stood beneath the arcades of the Piazza San Marco, veiled in charcoal silk, watching through the crowd of merchants and painters. Corbetta marched six guild constables up the marble steps of the exhibition hall, flanked by chemists carrying glass phials of lye and vinegar.
Lucrezia stood beside her mother near the velvet cordon, fanning herself with painted vellum, holding court for two sons of a wealthy silk factor.
“Signorina Moretti,” Corbetta announced, his voice slicing through the polite chatter of the salon. “Step aside from the hanging.”
Lucrezia blinked, a practiced, coquettish tilt to her head. “Syndic? Whatever is the matter? If you wish to purchase the reproduction rights, you must speak with my mother’s agent—”
“The Guild has received formal notice of illicit adulterants,” Corbetta snapped, not bowing, not removing his cap. He gestured sharply. An assistant dipped a cotton swab into the clear vinegar, pressing it directly to the crimson sleeve of a shepherd in Lucrezia’s centerpiece.
Bettina rushed forward, jewels clattering against her velvet bodice. “How dare you touch that cloth! That is a licensed masterpiece! You ruin the value with your filthy paws!”
“Silence, Donna Bettina!” Corbetta barked.
The cotton lifted away. It was stained a violent, smoking violet. A sulfuric stench bloomed in the air, acidic and unmistakable.
A collective gasp ripped through the gathered nobles. Several ladies pressed perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses, stumbling backward.
“Saffron-gall,” Corbetta said, disgust dripping from every syllable. He turned to the crowd, raising the blackened swab. “Contraband adulterant. Procured through unlicensed docks. Stripped of honors, barred from public display until inquiry.”
“No!” Lucrezia’s voice cracked into an undignified shriek. She lunged forward, catching her hem, stumbling against the cordon. “I didn’t—I am the artist! I only used fine dyes from Venice! Mother, tell him!”
Bettina’s face went mottled gray and scarlet. The young silk merchants were already backing away, whispering behind raised palms. Around them, the social circle that had nurtured Lucrezia’s vanity parted like the waters of the lagoon before a galley.
“Pack it into lead cloth,” the syndic ordered the constables. “Signorina Moretti, you will present yourself before the tribunal on the third bell tomorrow. Fail to appear, and your name is stricken from the rolls.”
Lucrezia buried her face in her hands, sobbing with raw, ugly abandon right on the cold terrazzo floor, surrounded by mocking glances and snickering rivals.
Sabia turned away, a dark, cool satisfaction settling deep inside her chest. The first pillar had crumbled.
Yet the victory tasted sweet for less than two hours.
When she returned to Palazzo Veracini, the inner courtyard was dead silent. The servants were gone from the loggia. Even Pippin was nowhere in sight.
She climbed the grand staircase toward the sunlit studio. The double doors stood open.
Inside, Orsino stood by the high workbench where her new sketches lay laid out. His greatcoat was unbuttoned, his face pale, drawn, hollowed by something sharper than fury.
On the mahogany table between them lay a sheet of legal vellum, stamped with the red wax crest of the Doge’s Chancellery and the seal of the Moretti archives.
“Orsino?” The name slipped past her lips before she could muster her formal armor.
He did not look at her eyes; his stare was fixed on the document. “Donna Bettina arrived here forty minutes ago. Accompanied by two magistrates.”
Sabia stopped three paces away. “Bettina was here?”
“She brought this.” Orsino tapped the vellum with knuckles gone white. His voice lacked its usual smooth warmth; it sounded scraped down to iron. “A contract. Signed three months ago. Commissioning the Moretti workshop to create the maritime allegories for the Naval Arsenal.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“You are named in it,” Orsino said, finally lifting his gaze. His eyes were bruised with exhaustion and a terrible, cutting sorrow. “Not as a designer. As an apprentice clerk who stole the primary cartoons from their vault before fleeing.”
Sabia stared. “That is a lie. A blatant, desperate lie!”
“The designs currently pinned to your drawing board,” Orsino pointed slowly to her worktable, where her revolutionary wave motifs were pinned in charcoal, “are described line for line in the registered Moretti archive inventory attached to this petition. Stamped, dated, and witnessed six months before you ever entered the Accademia.”
Bettina had anticipated her. The stepmother had backdated the guild registry through a bribed notary, claiming Sabia’s life’s work was nothing more than stolen family property.
“She forged it!” Sabia’s voice rang off the high stone walls. “Look at the ink! Smell the gum! Bettina has clerks who can mimic any notary’s mark in Serena!”
“I know what Bettina is,” Orsino whispered, but he did not step toward her. He looked down at the document, his shoulders sinking under an exhausting load. “I spent years telling myself that the girl I remembered was pure. That she was an artist locked away by monsters. But the magistrates verified the watermarks. The seals are genuine state wax.”
He looked at her, his expression shattering into profound disappointment.
“Did you use me, Sabia?” he asked softly. “Did you bring your stolen portfolio here, knowing my name would shield you from the magistrates until the prize money cleared?”
The air left Sabia’s lungs.
For weeks, she had told herself his opinion meant nothing. That he was only a convenient patron, an aristocratic shield to be used and discarded in her crusade to break the Morettis. But looking at the agony in his face, seeing that he truly believed she was a common thief who had exploited his childhood memories, something tore violent and deep in her throat.
Revenge was not enough.
She did not just need Bettina in the gutter; she needed to rip this lie apart with her bare hands, if only to erase the disillusionment carved into Orsino’s features.
“I stole nothing,” Sabia said, cold and steady. “Give me three days.”
Orsino looked at her, silence stretching like a drawn bowstring, before he turned his back to the light.