Free Immortal by Traci L. Slatton

street rodent like you can be impressed by Giotto, there’s hope for you. Just don’t end up like your old amico Massimo.”
    “Massimo? What?” I jerked upright. Pietro surveyed me curiously.
    “You didn’t hear? He fought with some lout of a condottiere over possession of a florin. The condottiere said no deformed street urchin could own a whole florin and stabbed him. In the neck, here.” Pietro tilted his head and indicated a pulsing spot on the line between his shrunken earlobe and his clavicle. “Poor ugly bastard spurted blood like a pig at the butcher. I put him on the cart to be taken out for a beggar’s burial myself. A few months ago.”
    I closed my eyes and remembered all the times I’d huddled somewhere with Massimo, sharing a scrap of bread or inventing a game to keep ourselves warm in the winter. I wondered if those same memories had struck him when he sold me to Silvano. My stomach clutched up as if I’d eaten bad food, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I felt badly for Massimo, or because I didn’t. Didn’t I owe him grief, after the time we’d shared?
    “Don’t dwell on it, boy,” Pietro said, touching my shoulder. “Did you know that the Holy Father himself sent a courtier here to see what kind of man and painter this Giotto was? The courtier arrived at Giotto’s workshop one day as he was hard at work. The courtier requested a drawing to take back to the Pope, and Giotto took out a sheet of paper and a brush with red paint, held his arm close to his body like so”—Pietro demonstrated—“and then, without any help from a compass, he drew a perfect circle! By his own hand!”
    “What’s a compass?”
    Pietro snorted. “An instrument used to draw a circle, Luca Stupido. That’s the point; Giotto so excels that he didn’t need one. The courtier thought he was being made a fool of, and argued, but at Giotto’s insistence, he sent the circle to the Holy Father, along with an explanation of how Giotto had made it. The Pope at once sent for Giotto. Giotto painted such beautiful works for him that the Pope paid him six hundred gold ducats!”
    “So much money.” I gaped. I tried to imagine a fortune like that, and the freedom and beauty it could buy, but my mind flitted out from within me as if I were trying to contemplate the boundless blue limits of the sky. I wondered if even Silvano could conceive of wealth on that scale.
    “Indeed.” Pietro patted my shoulder. “That’s enough for today, Bastardo; you will strain yourself under the heavy burden of this knowledge.”
    “I have another question,” I said, thinking of how Silvano hinted that he knew my origins. “I’ve been wondering about my parents. You hear what goes on in Florence, and you’ve been a monk here for a long time, do you know anything about them? Or where I came from?”
    “I remember you only from the streets, Luca. It seemed you were always there, though you look more finely built than the other ragamuffins. The color of your hair is unusual; perhaps you are the son of foreigners. Ask in the Oltrarno, you might find someone who remembers something.” He sighed. “I must go back to sweeping the walk, else the abbot will think I can’t even do that right. He will use it as an excuse to blame me for how people give more money to the Franciscans and the Dominicans than to our order. Go along,” he said. “A street mouse like you has a lot to keep himself busy with. Not that way, idiot,” he called up to a novitiate polishing the incense box at the altar. “You’ll damage the finish! The abbot will hold me responsible!” He bustled away. I sat for a while, thinking about perfect circles and moments of opportunity that change the direction of a life. I wondered if I would ever have a moment like that, or if my great moment would come at the sharp edge of Silvano’s knife.
    I walked along the Arno on my way back to Silvano’s and stopped at a shop near the Ponte alle Grazie to buy some candied