Page 20 of Bitter Burn
His jealousy is lovely, even if it’s the rankest hypocrisy, and I relent. “No others, Tristan. I’ve slept alone this last month. Sat in the hall untouched. Heartbreak has that effect, you see.”
He looks surprised at the word heartbreak, although how, I don’t know, and as I stand up, he jumps to his feet too.
“How can you be heartbroken when you were the one who lied? Who deceived us all?”
“Even Judas was heartbroken,” I say, “and I wasn’t the only Judas in my marriage anyway.”
He shakes his head slowly. “I’ll never understand you. How you can be so certain of yourself after everything you’ve done.”
Well. This I can make him understand. “When you’ve been where I’ve been, on those roads, in those pits of hell, you come to know that you can only be certain of yourself. You have nothing else to hold on to, not a flag or a creed, not the history you’ve been taught or the politics you’ve been given. You only have what you’ve seen and maybe, if you’re lucky, a sense of right and wrong to go with it all. You can’t rely on certainty to come from elsewhere, because it almost always comes as a lie from the mouths of the people who want to use you most.”
“I don’t want to use you,” Tristan says softly, and I have no good response to that. Because it’s true. Because I did want to use him, and I still do.
When I don’t answer, his eyes drift upward. “Why is your hair red?” he asks.
“Felt like a change. Why are you two in Rome?”
Tristan’s laugh has a bitter note to it. “Felt like a change.”
The darkness has thoroughly come for the city now, and Isolde will be wondering where her paramour is. I take a step backward into the shadows. “Bring my wife back, Tristan. I can keep her safer at Lyonesse, with all its flaws, than anywhere else.”
Tristan chews on his lip. “What if I can’t convince her to come back?”
“She has a way into the server rooms now, doesn’t she? Tell her I’ll let her use it if she comes back. She can even tell Cashel so.”
He rubs his eyes with his free hand but then nods. “I’ll see what I can do. I don’t like—I don’t like any of it. The saints. Ys. Her uncle. It feels too much like power for power’s sake.”
Oh, Tristan, I think. That’s where all power ends up if it’s left alone long enough.
“You never answered my question from earlier,” he says suddenly. “Why hire me when I barely had anything to do with Ys?”
I decide to give him a little of the truth then, a silver thread of it, perhaps the one bright part in the twist of secrets and lies. “Because you did the right thing when you killed Aaron Sims. Because I knew that if you could do the right thing even when it meant killing your best friend, then you could do the right thing while working for me. I knew that I could trust you with Isolde’s safety. I know that I still can.”
And before he can respond—before he can plead or fret or argue—I melt into the dark and leave him standing alone. Under a halo of lamplight like the tragic hero he is.
Nine
Isolde
Night still clings to the corners and arches of the Palazzo San Callisto, and I move as silently as the gray dawn currently sighing over the city as I slip into the courtyard behind my uncle’s Roman apartment.
Light spills from the tower of the butter-colored basilica next door, and I move a little faster through the shadows. They will be preparing for morning Mass. I need to be gone before then, before the piazza is full of the grieving faithful who’ve found no room to pray closer to the Holy See.
The front door is locked, but that’s not a problem. There’s a grate above the front door, an easy handhold, and then a balcony above that with a nice little railing I can use to heave myself upward. I inch the teal shutters open enough to get inside and find myself in the central stairwell. From there, I can reach the roof, and from the roof, the open window of the penthouse apartment.
The floors are tile—standard in Rome and the preference of any man with enemies, since carpet too easily muffles footsteps—and I slide out of the window as languorously and quietly as a cat stretching in the sun. There is a blink of light from down the hall, like headlights passing by, but we are on the top floor, so it’s not a car. And anyway, I already know what the light is.
I’ve never been here before but can immediately recognize the hallmarks of my uncle’s style. Sparse but tasteful antique furnishings. Tall ceilings with their original plasterwork and occasional frescoes, all of which are distinctly pagan in subject matter. A scattered rug or two that almost certainly has some complicated backstory, as a gift from such and such diplomat or a rescue from such and such villa that the Church sold off. Small pieces of art in a mix of cheap and expensive frames. Next to a crucifix, I see a picture of my mother—his sister—smiling in front of Cashel House with her blond hair blowing around her face, her gapped front teeth on display. Like me, she had a faint dash of freckles across her nose and an upper lip that forgot to dip in the middle. Like Mortimer, she had those distinctive teeth and eyes that didn’t quite match. She had smile lines so, so young because she was always smiling, like there was never a reason to stop.
Under that photograph is a picture I drew for him when I was in kindergarten, a church with little stick figures kneeling and praying outside it. It was beyond my childish skill to draw the praying figures inside the church, but I had known to bow their little stick heads and draw the ends of their little stick arms together, like folded hands. In blue crayon, I’ve given them all tears.
Why are they crying, little mouse? my uncle had asked when I’d bashfully given it to him.
Because they love Jesus, I’d told him. I’d been confused by the question. If you’d asked me to draw what it looked like to love God in any other way, I wouldn’t have understood. I wouldn’t have drawn hearts or large eyes. I wouldn’t have drawn their hands up in the air in adoration or them locking arms in their shared love. Love was kneeling. Love was tears.
My uncle framed the picture with its stick figures rendered in crayon with a heavy gilt frame fit for a Titian or a Rubens.
It abruptly unnerves me, and I’m not sure why. It should be evidence that my uncle treasured a gift from his little niece, the closest to a child of his body he’d ever have. But right now, in the near darkness, the weeping figures in their overwrought frame look more like the suffering sinners in Dante’s inferno, like an unhappy corner from a Bosch painting.
