Free A Golden Web by Barbara Quick Page A

you’re planning something—and Pierina knows it, too. Damn it, why won’t you let us help you?”
    She whispered her reply. “It’s something that I canonly do alone.” She took both his hands in hers, and felt how dear they were to her—and how much it would cost her never to hold them again.
    “Just tell me this—you’re going to live with the Sisters of Sant’Alba—just nod, yes or no.”
    In the firelight, Alessandra nodded once, very slowly.
    “And you will marry, in one year’s time, the person our father has chosen for you?”
    “Ah, don’t ask me that!” Alessandra knelt and stirred the fire and put some more wood on it. Her face looked golden in the circle of light.
    “You will take the veil?” Nicco hazarded.
    Without looking at him, Alessandra shook her head no.
    “Have you fallen in love with someone else?”
    “How could I, Nic, unless he were a phantom? I’m allowed to see no one, and no one sees me!”
    Nicco took her by both shoulders. They felt far too delicate and girlish to contend with the dangers of the world.
    “Whatever you’re planning,” he said, “you might have need of this….” He took his dagger out of its scabbard—the dagger he carried with him everywhere, which he usedto kill animals and cut them apart, to spear his food at table, and to defend himself from predators, assassins, and thieves if he was caught on the road after dark. “You’ll need to know how to use it, and how to keep it razor sharp.”
    She reached up and touched his cheek, where a beard—though fine and light colored—had begun to grow. “But your knife! Surely you need it yourself.”
    “I’ll tell Father that it was wrested from me in a game of chance. Or, better yet, lifted from me by a whore.”
    “Oh, Nic!”
    “Such a tale would please him. He’ll wink and then buy me another knife.” Nicco unbuckled the scabbard and gave that to Alessandra, too.
    She held both objects in her hands, put the knife in its sheath, and embraced her brother.
    “And this, too,” he said, pushing her away and placing a heavy little leather bag in her hands. “It’s not very much, but it’s all I have.” She could see the glint of tears in his eyes, and how he blinked to make them go away. “Just promise me, Alessandra, that you’ll call out to me for help if you need it! There is no risk I would not take for you.”
    “You are the best of brothers!”
    She opened the bag and counted out the ten coins it held. “How long, would you say, a man could live on this amount of money?”
    Nicco looked at her slantwise. “Here—or in some city?”
    “In some city,” said Alessandra.
    “A year, I’d say, if that man lived carefully.”
    She kissed his hands. “Thank you, Nic!”
    “You won’t tell me more?”
    She looked into his brave, blue eyes. “I’ll send word to you from the convent.”
    Her promise clearly made him happy. “Here, Zan,” he said, taking the knife from her. “I’ll show you how to make it sharp enough to slice through flesh as if it were butter.” He brought a sharpening stone out of his pocket and spat on it.
    Nicco’s knife—even Alessandra couldn’t guess that night how important a tool it would prove to be for her. How it would, in a sense, determine the course of her entire future.
     
    The family was gathered around the hearth. Alessandra was teaching Dodo his letters, incising them one by one into the skin of an apple with her little penknife—a gift from her father that doubled the number of knives she suddenly owned. If Dodo named the letter correctly, she let him take a bite of the apple. When every surface of the apple was incised and eaten, Dodo was allowed to feed the core to Nicco’s dog, and they started on another apple.
    The sun had set. The day itself had been overcast, and there wasn’t enough light now, of course, for reading. Pierina and Giorgio sang, though softly, as Ursula complained of a headache. Nicco sat and sharpened the new hunting