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The sun was just kissing the edge of the sky, spilling out over all it could reach in great, golden haze, when their guests arrived. Riccardo was still preparing the paints, at the time, and their master did not receive company before the sun fully descended, so it was Amadeo who went to greet them.
It was a hot evening, when the painting finally commenced, made hotter by Riccardo’s rising temper as he watched him: a young man painter—nearly a boy, no doubt only recently graduated from his apprenticeship—with eyes glued to Amadeo, lasciviously.
The older boy was a blundering mass of elbows, only a little bit older that Riccardo, and he was not set to make a good impression on Riccardo—barely taking his eyes off of beautiful Amadeo, poised coyly and uncomfortably contrapposto throughout the whole modeling session—barely even looking at his mentor or the Master who had invited them here for his instruction.
Not that the bumbling boy had been invited there himself, no. He had been brought on the graces of his own mentor, a master painter in his own right, and a friend of Riccardo’s master, visiting the palazzo with a talent to be honed. The boy was a journeyman, there to work under and assist in the needs of his master, before pursuing his own projects—not that he had done much of either. More time spent looking and looking and looking, the little leech.
“Pull the tunic down his shoulder, just a little—I want to capture the line of his neck,” the older painter said, and the painter boy moved forward—too eagerly, really—to feel along Amadeo’s waist, to run the hand not holding his palette along Amadeo’s side as he tugged his tunic, this way and that. It was completely inappropriate. Riccardo almost could not believe they were to let it happen, but their Master just smiled blandly at his own piece, where he was wielding the lead white mix that Riccardo pained to prepare for them—painting a shaft of light along the side of Amadeo’s ankle.
“A little more,” the man pushed further, leaning forward towards where Amadeo was poised. Riccardo leaned forward, too, trying to keep the boy’s damn wandering hands in sight. Amadeo held himself still, one hand twisted over and behind his head. Amadeo didn’t move anything but his head, minutely, and Riccardo watched his eyes sharpen to look the boy in his face, saw his mouth move, just a little, in whispered exchange.
“A little more, Rinaldo,” the older artist said, more demanding this time. From the way the man was leaned forward, Riccardo could not see his face. As if pulled by a string, the boy—Rinaldo—jerked his hand, and Amadeo jerked too, Riccardo nearly dropping their Master’s palette in alarm as—
The damn painter boy couldn’t seem to keep hold of his palette, either—it ended, upturned, all along the front of Amadeo’s tunic, the colors squelching together as they soaked into the front of the fabric—blue and white and bright, brilliant red.
When Riccardo was sent away to fix replacement for his soiled clothes, the boy was still looking, though at least he kept his paint-stained hands to himself. Still, Riccardo had wanted to stand between them, to shield his gorgeous friend from the eyes, even when Amadeo’s current task was to stand and to be looked at. It made something tight in Riccardo’s chest, not to mention the roiling anger in his stomach. You don’t deserve to look at him, he wanted to scream. Not like that.
When Riccardo had returned with a fresh tunic, they all had gone—all of them!—Amadeo and their Master and both of the guests. Even later, after the visit had ended, Amadeo never did tell him where they went, or what had happened.
Amadeo didn’t seem to tell him much of anything at all, these days.
It was almost Riccardo’s time. His time—that’s what he and the other boys called it. All of them, soft downy feathers and sharp growing pains in the golden nest of their Master’s palazzo. His time—time for him to spread his wings, to fly away from all of them. The time for him to start his life, his real life, away from the shell their master provided for them, the protection afforded to the apprentices of the garishly rich. He couldn’t stay here forever, after all. His Master made that clear. “When you leave me,” he would say, “when you rejoin the world.”
Riccardo had options, of course. Marius afforded him many connections, and spared few expense for his boys. Or, that is what Riccardo discovered, when he was paraded around the city with his teachers to be lectured about the options. “You’ll go to off to school, of course,” he was told, as if he hadn’t been taught under his Master for all the years he had lived there. “You have been an apprentice to so much,” the man continued. “Not just art, but also music, and language, and history.”
“The world will be laid out to you, as a journeyman,” his teacher continued. “You may assist all manner of masters, on your way to your own masterpiece.”
“You could be like him,” he said, pointing out those who worked under the Master whose workshop they were visiting, as they toiled on the schematics of the villa he was designing. “Or like him,” motioning to a musician of the guild holding a lute, young enough to still be honing his skills. “Or a painter, like the young man who visited your master just yesterday.”
Riccardo frowned, dissatisfied with the reminder, afraid allover again for who he was leaving behind. “Is there any way I don’t have to leave?”
His teacher laughed unexpectedly, and Riccardo felt it like a slap to the head.
“I suppose,” his teaches said, through a laugh, “you could be a teacher, and return to your Master’s palazzo to teach the new boys there,” he smiled, and the smile was tinged with a kind of longing. “Like I did,” his teacher said.
Riccardo was supervising one of the younger boy’s visits to the market, cutting a shortcut between two tightly-packed buildings, when they happened upon the crowd.
The day was a hot one, warmth spilling down from the heavens and settling over the canals, steaming between the alleys and making the people slow and irritable. The crowd throbbed with it, simmering like a stewpot over the fire.
“What’s happening?” Little Vincenzo asked, trying to peer over the shoulder of his brothers. His blonde hair rippled against his back as he jumped, and Riccardo took pity on him, grabbing him under the arms as he shrieked with delight, climbed up Riccardo’s back to perch on his shoulders. Riccardo held onto his legs, tried to peer through the crowd. No such luck—a commotion of people were pushing too much to get a clear view of the raised platform. “What do see up there, my little friend?”
“Oh.” The boy’s face was pinched, eyes squinted against the sun. “They’ve got a man up there.” Blond hair fell into Vinchenzo’s face, and he pushed it away distractedly. “And an axe.”
Ah, that explained it. The call for blood brought an excitement to the people of Venice, even on their laziest day: An execution always drew a crowd.
He began to move Vincenzo down—let the boy not get a sight of death too early—but the boy clung to him, scrambled up his back to perch on Riccardo again. “Looks like they’ve got a bonfire going, too.” He pulled at Riccardo’s hair, a little, and he clamored higher. “Seems overkill, doesn’t it?”
“He’ll be beheaded, and then burned,” a woman beside them spoke up. Her mouth was lined with a frown, her hair pulled severely back into her tachia. She displayed the sign of the cross around her neck, proudly over her neckline.
Vincenzo’s hung off of Riccardo’s shoulder, leaned his head down close to her to ask, “Isn’t the head enough? Must he be deader than that?”
The woman’s face pinched, her face slashed in disgust. “He was found entangled with another man,” she said meaningfully, and curled up her lip. “He has sinned against nature, and all remnants of his sin must be scrubbed from this earth.”
Riccardo’s heart sank in his chest. He looped his arms around Vincenzo, bullied him down from his shoulder—the little squirrel—to carry him away.
“The one he sodomized will be punished accordingly as well,” said a well-dressed man in front of them, turning around to gesture with billowing sleeves. “It’s disgusting, what these types will do to each other.”
“They turn from God,” the pinch-faced woman spit. “The whip is not enough for the other,” the derision in her voice was enough to make Riccardo shy away, try to carry both him and his charge away.
But his charge did not share Riccardo’s own hang-ups, bounding off Riccardo’s back to ask the woman: “They each bear a different sentence for the same crime?”
The woman sniffed. “Children should not hear of such a thing.”
“Hah!” The man tilted back his head to laugh, his earring twinkling in his ear. “He will be nearly be as old as the last month’s patiens, soon. Better he hear it.” Vincenzo scrambled off of Riccardo to listen, as the man went on. “The agens is always punished more harshly, since it is he who turned from God to this sin. The patiens merely endured the breach.”
“And it happens? Even to the very young?” Vincenzo seemed scared, now, and Riccardo grasped for his arm, eager to pull him out from this and back to their palazzo, but—
“This one was old enough to know better.” The other man came closer, secretive, leaning into Vincenzo, who eagerly leaned in too. “Did you hear,” he asked, “when they judged the boy’s case, they nearly decided to cut his nose off, as a punishment, and leave him standing in the square for an hour!” Vincenzo gasped, and the woman by Riccardo’s side tutted, shook her head. “To ruin his beauty,” the man went on, guffawing. “As if he were a woman!”
Riccardo had just run dry of fielding Vincenzo’s questions when they finally reached the house. He set him to right, smoothing his cap upon his head, and sent him on his way with the promise to not scare the other boys too much.
Just as he started to wonder after him, Amadeo appeared, stretching and yawning into the afternoon sun. His hair mussed slightly on one side, and Riccardo tamped down the urge to smooth it, like he would for Vincenzo—Amadeo was much too old for that, now. Amadeo rubbed at his eyes, and he was just so cute, Riccardo can’t help his smile. When Amadeo set his eyes upon Riccardo, he smileed back, and the afternoon seemed to brighten around them.
“I saw Vinny come inside,” Amadeo started, voice still rough with the last hanger-ons of sleep. “What sort of trouble did he try to start today?”
Amadeo liked to help Riccardo take care of the children, when he could—pulled, as he was, in so many different directions: managing the house, working with artists, and their master, of course. He’d been busier than ever, and Riccardo was glad to take any moment for the two of them he can. He smiled. “I only just pulled Vincenzo away from the hangman’s noose before he hung himself, purely out of curiosity for how it felt.”
Amadeo laughed, and Riccardo feels himself lean forward, pulled, inexplicitly into Amadeo’s orbit. “That sounds like him.” One hand rose to cover his mouth, but Riccardo would like nothing more than to see him laugh again.
Amadeo was shy about his laugh—embarrassed, or, that’s what he told Riccardo at least, on one afternoon when they were passing back and forth a bottle of wine under the shade of a tree. Too uneven, too… wild. Not becoming, he had said, as he covered his mouth, and Riccardo couldn’t figure out who could have told him that.
Amadeo had grown into his shoulders, and nose, and even the hair on his chest, but he hadn’t quite grow into his laugh. Counterpoint to Vincenzo, who struggled to grow into his mind, rapidly stuffed with his ever-increasing thirst for knowledge, until it grew nearly beyond his skull. “His curious mind will get him in trouble one day,” Riccardo rolled his eyes good-naturedly.
Amadeo’s hand, still hovering around his chin, folded over his mouth. His eyebrows came down—a worried expression? Or, perhaps, distressed? “I hope it doesn’t,” Amadeo murmurs.
Before Riccardo could uncover what that means, they were interrupted by a call from a second-floor window overlooking the garden. “Amadeo,” the voice calls, and even with the curtains are drawn the window, the voice is unmistakable as anyone but their Master. “Mio amato.” Amadeo’s head turned, quick as a bird’s, to the high open sill. Riccardo could see no figure beyond, but could just make out how the curtains twitched. “Ti vien da me.”
Riccardo cannot read the expression on Amadeo’s face, where his hand still lingers over his mouth. “Coming, Maestro,” he called, his voice a perfect blank canvas, waiting for a background wash of color to adorn it, to set its tone for the rest of the work.
Riccardo wondered if they will be painting, in the privacy of their Master’s bedrooms, or if they will be… well. Riccardo knew better, by now, than to think of it.
When Riccardo finally laid his head on the pillow—the boys all tuckered away, their wine-stains set to soak, the cool night air whispering in from the window—he was immediately asleep. And yet, in the next moment, he was awake again, baking under the midday sun, even as steam fogged the alleyways from the water, pushed in oppressively on all sides. Just like that, he was back in the square, the crowd thrumming for blood. Something was wrong—Riccardo pushed and pushed through the crowd, but he still couldn’t reach the platform, still couldn’t see who was up for slaughter, and then—
A scream. Blood-curdling and pained. Riccardo pushed harded, fighting against the fog like it had physical presence, until he pushed through to the front of the crowd, and—
And there, on the stage, was gorgeous Amadeo, crying helplessly as his nose gushed blood. So much blood, so steadily, that Riccardo could barely make out the skin and flesh underneath, but—
Amadeo wiped at his tears, at his steadily-dripping nose, smearing blood everywhere, just enough to see that his nose had… had been mangled. Hacked off. All that remained a bloody stump, steadily weeping blood.
And the blood was everywhere, it looked as though Amadeo was weeping blood, too, as he smeared it around his face in agony.
He swayed, but he could not escape the crowd pushing in around him—only to laugh at his misery, no one raising a hand to do anything but point and sneer in disgust.
Riccardo couldn’t seem to find Amadeo anywhere.
It was a dull party. As lavish as it was (and Lady Bianca could make any room shine) the company left something to be desired. Held in the Master’s palazzo, arranged and hosted by Lady Bianca—Amadeo had begged their master that Riccardo could go. Some company for him, Riccardo thought, someone Amadeo’s own age, since the rest attending seemed to be entirely their Master’s painter friends.
Riccardo couldn’t seem to find Amadeo anywhere, no matter how he looked and looked, but then—he could feel his temper spike when, instead of Amadeo, he saw him: the young painter, once again. And, of course, he was looking at Amadeo.
Amadeo always drew eyes. Especially amongst those who made it their life to capture beauty. And there was the boy painter again—Rinaldo was his name—who wouldn’t stop looking and looking and looking at Amadeo.
Amadeo seemed shy, almost embarrassed, when he finally worked his way through the crowds to Riccardo. He had amassed quite the entourage of fans. Their master did call him to be painted with far more regularity than anyone else. And with a face like that, who wouldn’t follow him until the ends of the earth?
“I’m sorry,” Amadeo said, when he finally drew away and reached Riccardo. Color high in his face, flushing his gorgeous cheekbones. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, and he dragged Riccardo to the center of the room. He couldn’t quite make eye contact when he leaned in close, whispered helplessly, “Master told me to kiss you.”
The world stopped for Riccardo. It was if the sky had opened up, a bolt of lightning from the heavens pierced him through and through. Kiss him? Their master said that? Their master who, behind closed doors, would—
Riccardo did his best to cut his thoughts off. Better not to think of it.
Beyond the golden circle of Amadeo’s attention, eyes followed the beautiful dark silhouette of him wherever he went—some furtive glances out of the corner of eyes, some unabashed staring. Riccardo could not see their master. But he must be there. Riccardo could feed the phantom weight of his eyes like a brand.
This must be how Amadeo must feel, he thought, all of the time.
Amadeo rubbed his finger and thumb, in the way he only did when agitated. He must have felt the eyes, too. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I know you probably don’t want to kiss me.”
“No,” Riccardo said quickly, too quickly, and watched as Amadeo flinched. “No,” he said, and he had to be brave, had to reach forward to grab Amadeo’s hand, to stop the fidgeting, to soothe it with his thumb. “I just mean…” Amadeo darted a glance up at him, gorgeous dark eyes open and pleading. “Not like this.”
It was dangerous, for one thing. The Venetian man thought it a sin against God.
“That one, over there—“ And Amadeo moved his eyes, careful not to turn his head, “he keeps bothering me,” Amadeo admitted quietly, looking away.
Over Amadeo’s shoulder, Riccardo caught sight of Rinaldo again, the disgusting little—
“And you told this to our Master?”
Amadeo nodded, bashfully looking away. “He told me to just get it over with. ‘He’ll follow you around until he can have you, or he sees that someone else already does.’ Said to put on a show. He says it’s either you, or I have to kiss Rinaldo.”
Could you not kiss either? Riccardo thought to ask, but, best not even think that too loud. They were safest at the grace of their Master, and that meant to never, ever question.
“I’m sorry,” Amadeo said, big brown eyes wet with unshed tears. “I dragged you here, and now I have to put you through this. I know neither of us wants this,” Amadeo closed his eyes, and Riccardo could swear felt his heart sink it his chest, begin to crack and splinter at the words as they fell from Amadeo’s beautiful lips, as his friend bowed his head. Amadeo didn’t want this? He never would have assumed, but… why do this to himself?
“And you’re worried Rinaldo will hurt you?” Riccardo asked reaching to curl his hand protectively around Amadeo’s elbow.
Amadeo laughed, a horrible, half-crazed sort of laugh, curls catching the light of the candles as he tossed his head. His gaze skittered away from Riccardo’s, looking out toward the party. Riccardo clenched his hand harder around Amadeo, wishing it were enough to shield him from the weight of dozens of eyes, to whisk him away from all harm. Riccardo let his gaze follow Amadeo’s to see Rinaldo, standing next to his older master, both pairs of eyes glued to Amadeo.
Amadeo looked away, buried his face in Riccardo’s shoulder. Faintly muffled, Riccardo could still hear him as he murmured quietly: “It’s not the little one I’m worried about.”
Riccardo swore his heart stopped beating for a moment. He clutched to Amadeo, wishing the hand on the back of his head were enough to shield him from view. “What happened,” he asked quietly, voice tense with emotion, “that day after I left?”
Amadeo shook against his shoulder—Riccardo could feel the sobs, though he didn’t make a sound. “I can’t be alone with him again,” he whispered, and Riccardo clutched at him tighter. Oh, Amadeo.
Riccardo wished they were anywhere but here and now, though he knew it was too dangerous to think anymore than that. What was he to do? He loved Amadeo too much to leave without him.
What was he to do?—Riccardo tilted Amadeo’s beautiful face up, and pressed his lips to Amadeo's gorgeous mouth.
“Was that enough? Can we leave now?” Riccardo whispered, right into the corner of Amadeo mouth.
Amadeo pushed himself back, one hand rising to his bottom lip. His curls were mussed from Riccardo’s hand, he pushed them back into place, licking his lip.
Around them, the room had gone silent.
“Amadeo,” Riccardo whispered, reaching for his wrist, “I think we should leave.”
Amadeo didn’t answer him, looking past Riccardo. Riccardo could feel the eyes of the party-goers like a brand. Boys were not meant to kiss other boys in Venice. The Veneticien man did not tolerate sodomizers. The sin against nature. They may be safe here, on the grace of their Master, who lived outside of the laws of nature. But Riccardo might not be safe in Venice again. And neither would Amadeo.
He tugged Amadeo’s wrist. “Amadeo, let’s go.”
The other boy shook off the hand, still not looking at Riccardo. “No, it’s okay.” He looked away again, one hand coming up to dance over the side of his neck. “I need to stay for a little while longer.” He tugged at the ends of his hair, pinched his earlobe, before he finally looked at Riccardo. “You can leave if you want!” he said cheerily, but all Riccardo could see was the little piece of skin pinched between two fingernails. “Thank you for coming, at least for a little while. And,” Riccardo felt his heart thud harder in his chest as Amadeo looked at him, really looked at, brown eyes dark and molten, mouth curved into a gorgeous little smile. “Thank you for the kiss.”
Was it enough? he wanted to ask. But Riccardo was afraid to know the answer.