Beside the sarcophagus, very erect as if to compensate for the lack of light, stood a young woman in black, her hair drawn severely back.
The soldiers bowed their heads to her and murmured her name.
Violante. The Adderhead’s daughter. She was still known as Her Ugliness, although the birthmark that had earned her the name was only a faint shadow on her cheek now it had begun to fade, people said, on the day when Cosimo came back from the dead. Only to return there soon.
Her Ugliness.
What a nickname. How did she live with it? But Violante’s Subjects used it with affection. Rumor had it that she secretly had leftovers from the princely kitchen taken to the starving villages by night, and fed those in need in Ombra by selling silverware and horses from the princely stables, even when the Milksop punished her for it by shutting her up in her rooms for days on end. She spoke up for those condemned to death and taken off to the gallows and for those who vanished into dungeons — even though no one listened to her. Violante was powerless in her own castle, as the Black Prince had told Mo often enough. Even her son didn’t do as she told him, but the Milksop was afraid of her all the same, for she was still his immortal brother-in-law’s daughter.
Why had they brought him to her, here in the place where her dead husband lay at rest? Did she want to earn the price put on the Bluejay’s head before the Milksop could claim it?
"Does he have the scar?" She didn’t take her eyes off his face.
One of the soldiers took an awkward step toward Mo, but he pushed up his sleeve, just as the little girl had the night before. The scar left by the teeth of Basta’s dogs long ago, in another life — Fenoglio had made a story out of it, and sometimes Mo felt as if the old man had drawn the scar on his skin with his own hands, in pale ink.
Violante came up to him. The heavy fabric of her dress trailed on the stone floor. She was really small, a good deal smaller than Meggie. When she put her hand to the embroidered pouch at her belt Mo expected to see the beryl that Meggie had told him about, but Violante took out a pair of glasses. Ground glass lenses, a gold frame Orpheus’s glasses must have been the model for this pair. It couldn’t have been easy to find a master capable of grinding such lenses.
"Yes, indeed. The famous scar. A giveaway." The glasses enlarged Violante’s eyes.
They were not like her father’s. "So Balbulus was right. Do you know that my father has raised the price on your head yet again?"
Mo hid the scar under his sleeve once more. "Yes, I heard about that."
"But you came here to see Balbulus’s pictures all the same. I like that. Obviously, what the songs say about you is true: You don’t know what fear is; maybe you even love danger."
She looked him up and down as thoroughly as if she were comparing him with the man in the pictures. But when he returned her glance she blushed — whether out of embarrassment or anger because he ventured to look her in the face, Mo couldn’t have said. She turned abruptly, went over to her husband’s tomb, and ran her fingers over the stone roses as delicately as if she were trying to bring them to life.
"I would have done exactly the same in your place. I’ve always thought we were like each other. Ever since I heard the first song about you from the strolling players. This world breeds misfortune like a pond breeds midges, but it’s possible to fight back.
We both know that. I was already stealing gold from the taxes in the treasury before anyone sang those songs about you. For a new infirmary, a beggars’ refuge, or somewhere for orphans to go . . . I just made sure that one of the administrators was suspected of stealing the gold. They all deserve to hang anyway.