The Wolf Esprit: Lykanos Chronicles 3

“To Venice,” he answered when I awoke in our carriage and asked where we headed.

Days had gone by since we’d escaped Rome. With careful precision, Duccio had seen us safely from the pursuing Roman wolves, disappearing from the church roof once he closed his mind to hide us from Lambruzco’s impending legion.

The cardinal had discovered us during Duccio’s anguish, when his mind’s discipline slackened to feel the brunt of his lament. But that vulnerability was passed. My forgiveness seemed to empower him trip-fold. And he was alive again, filled with a passion for the world, just as he’d been when we fled from Genoa.

But the thrill of hiding in Rome meant little to him now. He’d once loved proving his capacity to hide us in plain sight at the heart of danger. Flouting his defiance had intoxicated him, just as had our love. But now that he’d proven the degree of his invulnerability, the excitement would never be the same in light of losing our villeta, the home he’d made for us.

Lambruzco’s wolves had descended upon the house as we slipped away, no doubt stymied by the scene they discovered. But nothing in the property could connect them to Duccio or who he was; the deed and bank notes all belonged to pseudonyms of dead men.

We flew from Rome just as easily as we’d arrived, cloaked in Duccio’s astonishing mental power.

“Why Venice?”

“It’s how I’ll get our true home back from under Sforza’s thumb.”

I saw Duccio’s memories of Castello Palatino.

“You want to return there?” I asked. The place had become a shroud of suffering for him, cursed by what he’d done there.

“No more,” he said, answering my thoughts instead of my question. “It’s my home, my father’s home, and I want it back. I want to show all of it to you. I want us to be there together. And the only man who can help me take it back from Sforza resides in Venice.”

I didn’t respond, remembering what Sforza’s dog, Commendatore Lugano, had said upon our arrival at Genoa. Duccio was the lord of Palatino, and it had angered Sforza that he was not there, leaving the castle without his approval.

“I didn’t want to spend another moment there surrounded by guilt and shame. But now I don’t want to be under Sforza’s thumb, an endless reminder of the bastard who preyed upon my vanity and weakness.”

“But his wolves that chased us across the peninsula? None of them survived,” I said. “Will he even know what you’ve done? Should you not simply—

“I’ve betrayed him, Esprit. The details won’t matter. He knows I’ve betrayed him. There’s no going back to Milan. But with Venice’s help, I can at least take back Palatino and live under their rule. I’ll swear fealty to them as long as I need to—until I outlive them all, and Lake Como is truly ours again.”

“But how long will that all take?” I asked.

Duccio’s eyes lit up with severe joy at my impatient question.

“Take some advice,” he smiled. “Never bother to ask that question. Never let yourself be concerned with time’s passage. That’s a trap, Esprit, and a certain cause of grief. Allow yourself to live in the moment because life will take as long as it wishes without consideration for the answer you seek. Trust in me, and you’ll see the castle with your own eyes one day.”

He reached across the carriage to kiss me and silenced any other question I had of him.

Venice seemed like nothing to my eyes as we approached the city, little more than a tiny outcrop of buildings floating on the water miles ahead. Were it not for the dozens of massive ships anchored in the surrounding bay, I would’ve questioned our captain’s sense of direction.

Duccio’s excitement was palpable. It was another place he’d only seen in his father’s shared memories, and he’d been less than forthcoming about how much he wanted to be here. He wore a new black silk jacket and waistcoat over ivory taffeta with dazzling polished silver buttons, each depicting a wolf’s head. He donned a striking hat over the flawless powdered wig that fit him perfectly. Duccio had styled himself to enter the finest court as a monarch.

While Genoa had seemed fantastic, the immense metropolis built into the hills surrounding its great harbor. And Rome had absorbed me with its condensed, decaying grandeur. But Venice didn’t seem real as we approached it. It was a city as gilded and grand as the others, more so perhaps, but it floated at the center of a watery expanse, isolated from the rest of the continent as if it were not part of the world I knew.

Two massive columns rose to greet us, the first topped by the golden statue of a man holding spear and shield, the other guarded by a winged lion. As we stepped off the dock outside the massive Doge’s Palace, I felt the permanence of the stone floor beneath my feet, though it still seemed like an illusion. I was sure the sea would swallow us at any moment.

Waiting for no one, Duccio walked straight to the palace doors and announced himself telepathically to a lycan guard. The first acknowledgment began a process of introductions, one man after another, who each qualified Duccio’s claims until we stood in a drawing room on the second floor.

As we waited, I stared in wonder at the wall-sized maps painted all around us, stunning views of the world from the heavens I’d only seen glimpses of in the books of Gabrielle’s study. At the center of the room were two monstrous globes that embodied a cartographer’s dream of the earth. I dared not touch them but moved with increasing wonderment around each to see a hundred details, including the cities we’d raced through the past year.

The salon doors opened, and two men broke the silence upon entering. The first was the secretary who’d left us in this room. With him was a robust man who wore a satin robe of scarlet embroidered with fierce golden dragons. Over his shoulders, he donned an ermine mantle fringed in a white sable that framed his distinctive look of dissatisfaction.

“Don Lupofiero of Castello Palatino,” the secretary announced.

“Your Majesty,” Duccio said, falling to one knee.

The robust man approached and reached to raise Duccio’s bowed head to face him. He stared down almost tenderly, studying Duccio’s sapphire eyes.

“It’s true, then.” The man’s whisper was tinged with sorrow. “He is no more. Many have told me so over these years—lycan that could not lie to me. But I’d never allowed myself to believe it before this moment. Is that childish of me, wanting so desperately for it to be untrue? And now I hold the face of il Maestro’s son in my hand, and my quiet hope leaves me to despair.”

Tears flooded Duccio’s eyes. He seemed unprepared for the man’s gentle grace and fell apart.

With his words confirmed, the man drew Duccio from his knee to kiss his forehead before gathering him into a fatherly embrace.

“Some told me he took his own life, but I also refused to believe that. Tell me the truth, son. Why is he no more?”

I didn’t know what Duccio would say to this. I hadn’t expected his emotional response, and not wanting my knowledge of the truth to hinder him, I stepped away and turned my head as a sign of respect. The man’s secretary followed my action and did the same, which I felt the older man acknowledged with silent gratitude.

“Father was deeply unhappy—with me most of all,” Duccio said when he could, breaking from the man’s embrace. “I’d failed him so many times—failed to be the lycan he wanted me to become.”

“You’ll never convince me he didn’t love you,” the man answered.

“We had terrible arguments over his wish for me to succeed him, to take the mantle of Omega. And I never wanted it. I rejected the very idea of it. I refused to be one thing to him and something else to the rest of the world. Blinding vanity, of course.”

Gabrielle had once explained it to me during my studies, something that meant very little within the simple world of two lycan parents and their son. It was about the defined order of lycan wolf packs. Outside our fortress tower, lycan families are composed into packs where the mightiest hold alpha or beta designations to govern the remaining members. The positions run through the Greek alphabet, and the least of these positions is Omega. They are the youngest members and the least powerful—the first to fall in battle. Because of this vulnerability, they are the most expendable members of a pack.

But in the house of the ancient Sempronio of Mons Palatinus, the Omega was the guardian of a pack’s true strength. They were a teacher, oldest and wisest of all, who reared the young to maturity. They were not the least of a pack’s members but the last—the last to fall in battle, the last to need nourishment, and the last to need the help of his pack to survive. It was the Omega who nourished and advised a house’s Alpha.

While the outside world saw the great Sempronio as the Alpha of Castello Palatino, he saw himself as Omega.

“I wanted him to accept the ways of the world, which he refused,” Duccio continued. ‘Let the others in,’ I begged him. At least allow religion to be a choice here. I was raised in the church—we all were. I still keep Christ in my heart—

“But your father was raised in a different time,” the melancholy man interrupted him. “Christ would never penetrate his heart.”

“Still, I tried, Sir. He placed me in the role of Alpha… his version of Alpha… and I welcomed counselors from all our neighbors to visit Palatino and break bread with us. I wanted Father to hear them with his own ears, to see in them the truth of what the outside world was, that it was not a world of evil but of simple men. Men who admired him as much as they feared him.”

Duccio shook his head in despair.

“He rejected every one of them and chastised me for wasting his time. ’They must change their ways, for I will not,’ he insisted. And when I was most disappointed by Father’s position, Sforza took advantage.”

The man furrowed his sharp brow.

“Along with word of il Maestro’s death,” the man said, “my wolves have reported for years of Sforza’s claim on Palatino’s borders. So it’s true, then? But how? Sforza is nothing. A hundred Sforzas could not come within a league of Sempronio.”

“He used me,” Duccio said, his eyes peering off at the light flooding through the salon’s southern bank of windows. “‘Be the bridge between us,’ Sforza flattered me. He had me present Father with a gift—a sword—a token to reestablish talks between them. And in my blind hunger for the outside world, I brought Sforza’s sword and held it out to Father on one knee.”

The man became impatient when Duccio stopped.

“What do you mean?” he pressed.

“Il Vuto,” Duccio answered.

I looked back to see the man’s face fall to absolute rage, and he turned away from Duccio, moving about the salon as if to calm himself. He knew of the sword, of that much, I was certain.

“Sforza’s man, who’d brought the sword to the castle for my presentation, seized it from my hands and drove it into Father’s heart. It seems the sword was made from a substance—

The older man raised his hand to stop Duccio, but didn’t return his gaze. From Duccio’s mind, I saw flashes of his memory. It was not the whole he’d shared with me, but moments that made sense to the altered version he shared with this man. And he drenched the flashes with guilt, the genuine shame he felt, and his lies became true.

“And with your father dead,” said the man with an exhausted voice, “Sforza laid claim.”

“He made me lord of my father’s realm, but…”

“An administrator in his name.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Duccio said. “Even when I calmed my hatred for him, for the part I’d played in Father’s ruin, for the killing of those who resisted his wolves, I couldn’t bring myself to stay at the castle. His wolves burned Father’s texts, his inventions, and even his art.”

To this, the regal man turned his eye back to Duccio with urgent fear.

“All of it?” he whispered. I sensed his anger fall away, leaving his mind anxious.

“His library—the entire wing of the castle where it stood—they set fire to it. I’ve tried to reconstruct my memories of his lessons from my boyhood, but…” Duccio shook his head. “And so I left Palatino, wandering mostly, going wherever I could to separate myself. But Sforza didn’t care. He had what he wanted, and I wanted nothing more to do with it.”

The older man nodded his head as if he understood.

“Until I came across my nephew,” Duccio added, looking to me. “Come here, Esprit.”