A Golden Web Read Online Free

he gave to Alessandra, telling her that this treasure was for her and her alone.
    “You look like her, Zan-Zan,” said Pierina, gazing up into her sister’s wide-set, unmistakably almond-shaped brown eyes.
    “Hmm. I suppose I do.”
    “I look more like Papa’s family, don’t I?”
    Alessandra studied her sister’s blond hair and wide blue eyes with a familiar twinge of envy. “I’m sure our stepmother feels nothing but love when she looks at you.” They were both silent then, thinking about how little love their stepmother bore Alessandra. “Are you in, then? Are you going to play Disappearing with me and Nic today?”
    Pierina nodded.
    “Yours will be the hardest part.”
    “But where will you go, dressed like a boy?”
    “Into my newest study hall stocked with books I’ve never read nor touched!”
    “What are you talking about? We have the best library outside of Bologna.”
    Alessandra felt cheered up again, thinking about her adventure. “Ah, but this is a study hall filled not with books but the wonders of Nature—with birth and growthand death and decay, plants and creatures, earth, water, and sky.”
    “Are you running away?”
    “Just for the day—I’ll be back before supper. And if you’ve played your part well, no one shall ever know I was gone.”
    Alessandra kissed her, then scrambled up onto the windowsill. “Godspeed, Pierina!” she called out over her shoulder before steeling her nerves and jumping outside.

Four
    Nicco had decided it would be best to have Alessandra ride behind him on Nero, at least at the start, until she grew enough to handle a full-size horse on her own.
    She wondered if they would find a hare or a partridge, and whether Nicco would kill it—and whether she would be able to bring herself to look, rather than turn away as she often did when faced with the sight and smell of blood.
    She thought of and then brushed away the memory of her mother’s body split open from chest to just belowthe naval. She smelled the hot blood and felt her father shaking with sobs and watched between her fingers as the midwife pulled Dodo out, still in his caul.
    Alessandra held on tighter to Nicco and pressed her cheek against his back, willing the image away. She felt some comfort in knowing that he, too, had been there and seen what she had seen. She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer to their mother, asking her to watch over them.
     
    They spent that first day in the border of sunlight and gloom at the edge of the forest. Alessandra practiced climbing up and down off Nero’s back, using the low branches of a tree as her ladder. She learned the proper way to tie Nero to the tree—which turned out to be the same as the bookbinder’s knot she’d seen so many times before but never bothered to learn how to make. She and Nicco climbed the tree and found some feathers that Nicco said were the remains of a red falcon’s meal. And Nicco told her how this was a falcon he hoped to trap one day and train to hunt with him.
    They sat in the canopy of the tree, and Nicco, in awhisper, told her everything he knew about the sounds they heard there: the names of birds, and which were good to eat and which made songs so beautiful that it would be a sin to kill them, especially now that the years of rain were over, and not nearly so many peasants were dying of hunger as before.
    To both of them, the tree seemed filled with the breath of God. When they climbed down, they saw that this tree was part of a ring of trees growing around a clearing. Nicco stuck his fingers inside a mound of leaves at the base of the roots and pulled out a mushroom that was shining white and the size of Alessandra’s thumb, with a slantwise cap as delicate looking as a piece of skin.
    Alessandra’s eyes grew even wider than they were already in the half-light of the clearing. “Isn’t that—?”
    “The very kind our own dear Cook once paid for with a fine, plump hen—and Father had her flavor a broth with it