“He’ll be tried and burned at the stake, of course.”

Adair took a step toward the table. It was scattered with papers, and he thought he recognized a few from Cosimo’s study. “Let Cosimo go and I’ll do as you ask. I’ll go to Scolari’s lectures, I’ll be his best student.”

Zeno stepped around the table until he stood in front of Adair, fixing him with a steely stare, no longer the comical little man in his nightcap. “Oh, you will do that anyway, if you wish to live. That was the bargain you struck with your father. You had your chance. I am not the only one whose patience you have exhausted. Believe me, if I sent word back to your father that you had met with an untimely—but not unexpected—end, he would understand. And perhaps be a little relieved, too. He always knew you were headed for trouble.

“This mess you have made is salvageable, however. That lie you told my guards at the heretic’s house—they reported it back to me, of course. And that’s the story we will tell, that you agreed to be my spy and ferret out the Satanist living in our midst; that will be our explanation as to why you have been in the company of the heretic. Luckily, Moretti’s servants are already spreading that story all over the city. Venetians do love a good piece of gossip,” he said in an aside to the bishop.

“You can’t do this to me,” Adair said, in despair.

Zeno observed him coldly. “I can and I shall. It’s about time you grew up, my boy. Give up and give in. We all do. You’re not a child anymore; it’s time to put away your childish dreams. Take your place in society, as your family wishes. Or I will crush you, and end your family’s embarrassment.”

“And what can I offer you in exchange for Cosimo’s life?”

“There is nothing you can do for Cosimo. He must be sacrificed.”

The bishop leaned over the table toward Zeno, raising a finger for the doge’s attention. “Wait, your grace. There is one thing he might do. . . . I could speak to the inquisitors on Moretti’s behalf if you”—he narrowed his eyes on Adair—“agree to marry Elena.”

Adair’s heart squeezed as though a hand closed over it. “I beg you not to ask this of me. She’ll not find happiness with me. You are sentencing us both to a lifetime of misery.”

Rossi was unmoved. “You heard the doge—it’s time you grew up and took your medicine like everyone else. Do you think that every married couple lives in bliss? That only the well suited are allowed to wed? You make the best of it, that’s what you do,” Rossi said sagely as though he, an unmarried member of the clergy, had any experience in the matter.

Zeno turned away from Adair, heading back to the table. “The matter is settled. You will be engaged to the bishop’s goddaughter. You will be revealed as one of my agents and responsible for the arrest of the heretic Moretti.”

“You will spare Moretti?” Adair asked hopefully.

“I will consider it,” Zeno answered through gritted teeth.

It was the best he could hope for under the circumstances, with the arrest still fresh. Adair backed out of the room, retrieving his cloak at the door before shoving his way through the clerks waiting on the outside, to retreat to his chamber.

He hid the book and his packet of spells with the utmost care, moving them to another room that he could access easily should he need to make a quick getaway. He didn’t think any corner of his room would be safe from search now. The next few days were spent attending Scolari’s lectures, where Adair’s mind wandered incessantly. How could he pay attention as the old physician droned on when Cosimo was languishing in prison? It was Adair’s fault, and what’s more, there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. He wondered, however, why the old Neapolitan couldn’t use magic to free himself. There must’ve been something in one of those dusty old books that would be helpful in this situation. Surely the old man knew a vanishing spell, or a way to charm the guard into unlocking the manacles. Or perhaps he could telepathically influence the inquisitors to find him innocent. There was so much he didn’t understand about magic and its reach.

He had wanted to go see Cosimo right away but knew he had to bide his time or risk pushing Zeno over the edge. He also feared he might arrive too late, turning up at the dungeon one day to find that the inquisitors’ tortures had killed him. Too, Cosimo might’ve heard of the false rumor they’d spread about Adair being a spy and would want nothing to do with him. It pained Adair to think that Cosimo might die thinking Adair had betrayed him.

Within a few weeks, Adair received a letter from his father informing him that he’d agreed to the marriage arrangements. He even wrote a few words about the benefits of an alliance with Elena’s Florentine family, but Adair knew it was all for show: with any luck, he would remain in Italy after the wedding and would, for all his family cared, cease to be their worry anymore.

Finally, after a month had passed since the arrest and Adair could stand it no longer, he went down to the dungeons very late one night. He brought coin to bribe the guard into letting him see Cosimo. By then, the old man had been let out of his manacles and put in a cell, although it was so small that he couldn’t stand fully upright in it. The floor was covered with filthy straw that had probably never been changed, and the walls were damp, as though the lagoon were trying to reclaim the doge’s palazzo by stealth.

Adair lifted the lantern to see the old man’s face turned up to him expectantly. Cosimo was in a terrible state. His royal robes were crusted with his own blood and gore and torn to give the torturers access to his vulnerable spots. All the parts of him Adair could see—his wrists, his bare feet, his throat—were raw with evidence of torture.

Adair handed him a package of food, enough to last several days if the rats didn’t get to it, and a bottle each of wine and water. Cosimo looked suspiciously at the package even as he accepted it. “Why did you bring this? To assuage your guilt for being the one responsible for my arrest—”

“I hope you know me well enough not to listen to that. It was a story I made up the night you were arrested to get entry to your house. I was trying to save the books . . .”

Cosimo’s eyes glittered with life for the briefest instant. “And did you?”

He shook his head. “I could carry only a few. I hid some in a square not far from your house but I fear they’ve since been discovered. There is a massive witch hunt going on.” He hung his head. “In the end, I was able to save only one, the blue book.”

Cosimo nodded. “Of all the books in my library, that was a good one to save. Take care of it. Don’t let the inquisitors get their hands on it. Save it for the ones who come after us.”

“Don’t give up, Cosimo,” Adair said, trying to comfort him. “I’ve asked the doge to release you. I’ve even agreed to marry Bishop Rossi’s goddaughter in exchange for his support in the matter. Now it’s up to Zeno.”

Cosimo shook his head. “My boy, there is no way for Zeno to pardon me. He’s made too much of a spectacle over my arrest. And now this witch hunt . . . The townspeople will see a Satanist behind every bush. It would be impossible for it to end any other way than with my death.” He said all this with an air of detachment, as though he were talking about someone else.

Adair was shocked. “How can you say that? You mustn’t give up hope.”

“It is impossible.”

“Then . . .” Adair thought again about using magic to help Cosimo escape. If anyone would know how it could be done, he should. “Tell me how to use the spells to get you out of here. There must be a way for magic to help you escape.”

The old man seemed resigned to his fate. “I don’t have the strength or the necessary equipment to do anything from inside the dungeon.”

“Then tell me what to do, which spell to use . . .”

“No. I will not have you put yourself at risk any further by trying to help me escape. I am very old and, given that I made my living for many years as a knight, should have been dead a long time ago. I’ve already had more years on this earth than I deserve. I’m ready to die.”

“It’s my decision—”

“No.” He squeezed Adair’s hand one last time. “It’s my decision. I want you to bide your time and then make your escape. I know you to be a headstrong boy, but this one time, young squire, listen to me.”

Adair left the dungeon with his heart aching. He had to find a way to save Cosimo, even if the arsenal of recipes he had to choose from was much reduced. He stayed up as late as he could that night, poring over his loose pages and the blue book, trying to find a spell that could help Cosimo. But when Adair went downstairs in the morning, he was told that the old knight had taken his life last night in his cell. He’d broken one of the bottles Adair had brought and used the glass to slice his wrists and his throat.


PRESENT DAY

The light in the room in which Adair lay with Lanore had grown dim. Outside the window, a storm tossed violently, the kind that swept up on the island without warning and battered the rock mercilessly. Adair huddled closer to Lanny for warmth, fingering a lock of her hair absentmindedly while he listened to the wind rattle the glass panes.

He was covered in sticky sweat from his recollections of Venice. He could remember those days in Zeno’s palazzo with precision: the damp of the streets, the moldering smell of his bedchamber, the bottle-green silk lining of his cloak, and the long pheasant feathers fixed to his cap.

And yet he had other memories of Cosimo, impossible ones from another time, an earlier time. Of Cosimo not in Italy but in the Ceahlău Massif mountains where Adair had grown up, the stretch of land that had been traded over the years, back and forth, between Hungary and Romania. In these memories, Cosimo was dressed in a rough peasant’s shift and coarse woolen leggings, and was not the regal figure he’d known in Venice. Adair, a boy of seven or eight, stood in a mud cottage with a thatched roof, a primitive place with pigs running in and out of the house as though it were a barn. Adair was being restrained by his father as Cosimo was dragged out of the cottage by two of his father’s men. They were forcing Cosimo to kneel in the mud before the stump he used for splitting firewood, and next to the stump stood an executioner in his black leather hood, a massive broadsword in his hands.