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that he served to the Bishop.”
    “I saw nothing before you dug it out! How did you know it was there?”
    Nicco screwed up his face, trying but failing to find the clue that had let him know. “Perhaps the way theleaves there looked a little more disturbed—but I think it’s something else about things that are hidden underground. I just feel them sometimes—like heat, only it’s not heat, but something else.”
    It was Alessandra’s turn to be rapt with admiration. Her heart beat a little faster, thinking about how there might well be as many wonders beneath the surface of things as there are above, if one could but figure out how to see them.
    They untied Nero and walked deeper into the woods. Nicco found the delicate skull of a vole and the scat of the bear that had eaten the animal. The horse clearly didn’t like being there. “But how can he know,” asked Alessandra, “that a bear was here, perhaps weeks before?”
    “Because bears, like all creatures, have their pathways—and Nero no doubt smells or else somehow senses the presence of the bear, from whenever it passed by and ate this vole.”
    Alessandra took the clean, white, beautiful skull—as delicate as the carved ivory elephant she once saw in a stall in the marketplace in Bologna, when her mother had taken her along to buy spices. Alessandra had been allowed to hold the tiny elephant in the palm of her hand.
    She wrapped the vole’s beautiful little skull carefully in a broad leaf and put it in the pocket where it was most likely to stay safe and whole.
    By the end of the day, she had a new respect for her brother, filthy hands, and an ache inside her to find out more. “No wonder you find Aristotle dull, Nicky! Why read about learning, when the entire world spreads its wonders at our feet?”
    They ate the hunk of dried fish and two hard rolls Nicco had taken from the kitchen when Cook’s back was turned. (In fact, she had seen him—but she doted particularly on the Master’s elder son, and allowed him the pleasure of thinking he was outsmarting her.) Then they went to a special little place Nicco knew about, beside a stream, and gorged themselves on blackberries until their teeth were blue.
    Alessandra nearly fell asleep as she rode behind her brother on the way home. She was roused by the sound of the church bells tolling Vespers, telling her that they’d stayed away too long, and that even if Pierina had played her part brilliantly, there was no way Alessandra’s absence from home could have gone unmarked.
     
    Nicco pleaded ignorance about Alessandra’s whereabouts when he reached the table, dirty and out of breath, midway through the meal. Pierina blushed to the roots of her blond hair.
    “Well, young lady,” said their father, cocking his head to one side.
    Taking a big swallow of water from her goblet, Pierina nearly choked. “I thought she was with Nicco,” she spluttered between coughs. “Cross my heart and hope to die!”
    “Hush, child,” said her stepmother. “You ought to be more careful about what you say.”
    Carlo Giliani glanced across the table at Nicco, who could almost look at him eye to eye now. Nicco tried his best, without any words at all, to plead with his father: It will be bad for Alessandra if you pursue this! He chose the biggest piece of bread on the platter at the center of the table, and then heaped some fish for himself on top of it. “My favorite sauce!” he said to no one, a little too cheerfully.
    Ursula banged the flat of her palm on the table, makingthe crockery tremble. “Where is your firstborn sister?”
    Pierina’s goblet fell to the floor, where it broke in several jagged pieces on the alternating black and white tiles.
    “You will be the death of me, you three!”
    “ Ecco! Here she is,” said Nicco, staring past his stepmother’s head at the doorway, where Alessandra stood, dressed as herself again. She stretched and yawned in a perfect mime of sleepiness, as if she’d just