Free Color Song (A Passion Blue Novel) by Victoria Strauss

doze, jolting awake from time to time, her heart pounding as she remembered all over again what she’d done and why.
    As dawn began to gray the sky, she climbed to her feet, her body aching. The bandage on her injured hand was stiff withdried blood; she peeled it away, making the cut bleed again. The torn flesh gaped. With nothing to clean it, the best she could do was to tear another strip from her chemise and wrap it up again.
    She untied her belt from around her waist and knotted it below her breasts so her novice gown would look a little more like an ordinary woman’s dress. She unwound the kerchief that hid her hair, pulling it over her shoulders like a shawl and letting her long braid fall free. From the bundle she took the silver plate, which she slipped into her bodice. Then, hooking the bundle’s cord over her arm again, she set off into the city.
    Her fear was still with her. But it was far too late for second thoughts. If she returned to Santa Marta now, there was not a chance in the world she’d ever be allowed to set foot in the workshop again. She could only go forward. Knowing this was oddly liberating. As she moved toward the next hurdle of her journey she felt, if not brave, at least determined.
    The city was waking: housewives throwing back shutters, laborers hurrying to work, tradesmen bringing their wares to market. Giulia followed the flow of traffic, and in less time than she expected found herself at the edge of Padua’s great market piazza, with rows of stalls being set up for the day and the long bulk of the Palazzo della Ragione rising above them, the lead plates of its vast domed roof gleaming in the first light of the sun.
    She began to wander among the stalls, already thronged with early shoppers. The clamor of commerce beat against her ears, and with every breath she drew in the market’s odors: produce fresh and spoiled, wood smoke, animal dung, crowded humanity. At last, among the stalls crammed into the palazzo’s ground-floor portico, she found a seller of metal andleather goods. She paused a moment, gathering her resolve, then approached the stallholder.
    “Do you buy?” she asked, trying to sound confident.
    “I might.” The stallholder, a skinny man with a mouthful of bad teeth, eyed her skeptically. “Depending on what’s being offered.”
    She pulled the plate from her bodice. He took it, turning it in callused fingers, biting it and examining the mark.
    “Silver,” he said. “Not the best quality. Still, it’s a decent piece. I’ll give you twelve soldi.”
    Giulia knew nothing of the value of silver; but she knew good quality from bad, and she could see that the stallholder was more eager than he wanted to appear. “Twenty soldi,” she said boldly. “It’s very good quality, I know it for a fact.”
    “Thirteen soldi, six piccoli. That’s a better offer than I’d make to most.”
    “Give it here, then. I’ll sell it somewhere else.”
    “Fifteen. You’re robbing me, my girl.”
    “Eighteen.”
    “Sixteen and six, and not a piccoli more.”
    Giulia hesitated. “Done.”
    The stallholder counted out the coins, fingering each one as if reluctant to let it go.
    “You’re not as innocent as you look,” he said as he put them in her hand. “If I was the kind of man who stuck his nose into other people’s business, I might wonder where you got that plate.”
    Giulia felt the blood rising to her cheeks. She turned away, holding tight to the money.
    There were several stalls selling rags and old clothes. At the biggest, she sorted through piles of garments laid out on a trestle, selecting a mantle, a cap, a shirt, a pair of woolen hose,a doublet, and a peasant’s thick woolen tunic. The clothes were patched and darned, but otherwise whole and reasonably clean, and not infested with fleas as far as she could tell.
    “How much?” she asked the stallholder’s wife.
    The wife, a plump, pretty woman with red hair escaping from beneath a kerchief, turned