Assassin's Heart (Assassin's Heart, #1)(44)

“The patterns are up to each individual, but the slashes aren’t mine. The mask isn’t mine.”

“Do you often trade masks?”

“No, we don’t trade masks. It’s my brother’s mask. Rafeo. I got them . . . confused.”

My chest tightened at the memory of the dark tunnel, and my brother alone down there, my mask resting beside him. Maybe my mask comforted him the way his mask comforted me. I hoped Safraella had given him a fast rebirth. He had probably been reborn already and was being cradled warmly by his new mother. I hoped his new life offered more peace than his last one.

Alessio looked at me. “He died in the fight?”

“Yes,” I whispered, not trusting my voice any louder.

He nodded. “I’m sorry. I understand what it’s like to lose your family. Someday it won’t be so hard, and you’ll be able to think of them without the pain.” He handed the mask to me.

I held it in my lap. “When we were children, once, travelers passed through Ravenna with their menagerie. They had caged tigers. I’d never seen anything like them before, and never since. No books or tapestries could convey the colors, and the way their muscles rippled beneath their fur and stripes, and how their gold eyes stared at me. They were so beautiful.

“Rafeo . . . Rafeo could not stop talking about the tigers. I think they changed him, changed the way he saw the world, saw his place in it. He earned his mask two months later, and it was no surprise when he requested a tiger’s black slashes.” I rubbed my thumb over the black marks on the mask.

“My family were travelers,” Alessio said.

I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

He smiled and gestured to his face. “Can’t you tell from my handsome nose? My coloring?”

I looked at him closer. Of course I had noticed his skin color, his nose, but I hadn’t known they were markers of some kind. I shrugged. “I haven’t met a lot of travelers.”

Travelers were so called because they would travel across the dead plains without fear. One of their gods protected them from the ghosts. They were menagerie people, keeping dangerous animals and bringing them to cities for shows and viewings. Most of them hailed from Mornia, a country to the east, where they lived until they needed funds. Then they would gather and put on a tour until they made enough money to return home.

He glanced at the mask again. “What did your mask look like?”

“It had azalea flowers.”

“Because they’re poisonous?”

I nodded. “Truthfully, they never meant as much to me as Rafeo’s tiger stripes did to him.” I put it on and then slid it to the top of my head.

“When will I get a mask?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. You should’ve had one by now. As clippers, we’re given one before we go on our first solo job. In Lovero, there are tradesmen who craft the masks for the Families. They’re made from the bones of oxen that are raised on feed blessed and sprinkled with holy blood. It’s a secret craft only they practice. I don’t even know where to begin here in Rennes. Did you ever ask my uncle about it?”

“He refused. You heard him. He doesn’t allow any masks around him. He wouldn’t even show me his. Sometimes, when he’s really drunk, I hear him cursing Safraella. Sometimes I hear him begging. I think the mask reminds him of Her and brings about dark thoughts.”

I shook my head. “He does himself no favors in Her eyes.”

“I don’t think he wants to. He punishes himself.”

I understood that. But for my atonement I’d rather do something, work toward killing the Da Vias instead of getting drunk and raging at the night.

“Training me was a sort of penance,” Alessio said, “but he refused to train me all the way. Perhaps he looks at me and sees a path to redemption. Or maybe he was just a lonely man who found a lonely boy and figured they could find safety from the ghosts together.”

I smiled. “You could be a poet, with words like that.”

He returned my smile, and I felt it deep in my stomach. “Kalla Lea, I could be a lot of things, if I so chose. But I choose to be a clipper.”

I climbed to my feet. “We’ll start with poisons.”

He smiled even more brightly and leaned forward. “Anything you can teach me, Clipper Girl.”

“As much as I can until we leave.”

His eyes darkened, but he climbed to his feet and nodded. “Until we leave.”

Behind him, a flash of white light appeared in the alley beside my safe house. The light moved, then vanished behind a building before reappearing.

I walked to the edge of the roof for a better look. I tightened my arms around myself, my fists clenching. The ghost was so close this time.

“Sometimes the streets are full of them,” Alessio said quietly as we watched the specter drift away, looking for a live body it could take as its own. “Even I don’t venture out on nights like that.”

I remembered the horrible screams on the dead plain, the black emptiness of the ghost’s open mouth as she reached for me, the iciness of her fingers as they slipped through my flesh, trying to claim my body as her own. I remembered hiding in the boat on my first night here, the ghost waiting for me.

I released a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.