Free Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) by Craig Schaefer

what his father’s hair had looked like long ago—but beyond that the two men couldn’t have been more different.
    A pair of women clung to Carlo’s arms, giggling, draped in forest-green habits. Novices from the Order of the Harvest. Amadeo knew he should get their names, speak with their matron, but he was too tired and disgusted to care. Carlo spotted him, disentangled himself from the women, and waved, grinning like a loon.
    “Amadeo! Hey, hey!” he called, dropping into the bench beside him and throwing an arm around Amadeo’s shoulder. His breath stank of cheap red wine. The women milled about, giggling and whispering to each other.
    “Carlo,” Amadeo said flatly. “Enlightening some of the novices, I see.”
    “Oh, you know. I enlighten them a little, they enlighten me a little, we swap some parables. Hey. Seriously. How’s my father?”
    “He would be better if you spent a little time with him.”
    Carlo winced. His arm dropped from Amadeo’s shoulder.
    “He doesn’t need me around,” Carlo said, giving another, less confident smile. “He’s got you!”
    “Every father needs his son.”
    “Aren’t you afraid I’ll embarrass him?” He said it jokingly, like a playful challenge, but Amadeo thought he saw something else behind the facade.
    “No,” Amadeo said. “Because you love him. And he loves you.”
    The smile faded. Carlo kicked the toe of his shoe into the dirt. His voice was soft.
    “My father is going to die, Amadeo.”
    “In time, yes.”
    Carlo looked at him, suddenly frantic, almost pleading. “I shouldn’t have to
deal
with that.”
    Amadeo put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
    “What you have to deal with, right now,” he said, “is that there is an ailing man in there who very much wants to spend his remaining hours with his son. You can make him proud, Carlo.”
    “It would help,” said a woman’s voice at their backs, “if you didn’t gallivant around with whores.”
    Livia, Carlo’s sister, stood regal and serene in a black brocade gown. Her charcoal hair was piled on her head in a wave, fixed in place with a silver pin. She looked at the two novices and fluttered an irritated hand.
    “Yes. I called you whores.
Leave
.”
    “Hey!” Carlo snapped, shrugging off Amadeo’s hand and standing to face her. “You can’t talk to them like that.”
    Livia arched an eyebrow. “Why? Have you not paid them yet? I’m sorry, my mistake. They’re only sluts.”
    One of the novices ran off with tears brimming in her eyes. Carlo called to her, flailing his arms, chasing her across the garden with the other novice in tow. Amadeo watched them go without a word. Livia dropped into Carlo’s seat, sighing like she’d just hauled a sack of bricks across the courtyard.
    “A bit harsh,” Amadeo said lightly.
    “Was I wrong?” she asked.
    “I said harsh. Not wrong.”
    “And
that
,” she said, “is the next leader of our Mother Church. Gardener help us all.”
    “Your father has faith in him,” he said.
    “And do you?”
    He had to think about how to answer that.
    “I have faith in your father.”
    Livia looked him over, her emerald eyes birdlike and keen.
    “You have a smudge of dirt on your right hand. And another on your cassock, just over your heart.”
    Amadeo nodded. “So I do.”
    She favored him with the ghost of a smile, showing him the smudge of soil on her own right hand.
    “Look,” she said, “we’re twins.”
    Amadeo chuckled. “He got you too, hmm?”
    “‘And so I swear to love my brother as I love you, Father,’” Livia recited with a sweet smile, which faded to her usual dour frown in a heartbeat.
    “And was that love, just now?”
    “My love can be cruel,” Livia said. “You know my father is a good man, and a holy man, but he can be a manipulative old bastard too.”
    “I can’t argue that,” Amadeo said with a faint smile. “But he believes Carlo is a better choice than anyone the College of Cardinals could bring to the