Work Text:
They ride out of Rome just after dawn.
A small, unassuming party: just a scant half-dozen horsemen guarding a small carriage. Nothing like the army Cesare had led to Forlì, as much as it feels as though he is heading towards another battle. One might mistake them for the retainers of a merchant's wife, or a wealthy abesses's hired guards— no indication that the young woman inside the carriage, shrouded in black, her posture as still and pristine as a pagan's marble statue, is to be the new Regent of Naples.
As they ride through the countryside south of Rome, horses' hooves crunching the packed earth, Cesare marvels at the peasants who watch them from their fields. How sad, that the most exciting moment in any of their lives should roll past and receive nothing more than a stolid, heavy-eyed stare.
Normally, the journey would take them along the coast, following the ancient Appian Way, but Cesare turns their party inland, up into the scrubby Apennine foothills.
He has two explanations planned for their change in route, which he holds in readiness for when Lucrezia asks him about it. If she is cross at how long they are taking, he will tell her that there have been reports of banditry along sections of the regular route. If she is looking wistful about her pathetic, paper-tiger former husband, he will tell her that she should not take the same route to return to Naples as its ruler that she did escaping it as a fugitive.
He works through these two options over the first three days of their journey, days in which Lucrezia will not speak to him. On the road, Cesare rides at the head of the party, casting glances back in the hopes of catching a golden glimpse of her. In the evenings, the only moment he sees her is when he holds out a hand to help her out of the carriage: her hand tucks into his, a fluttering bird come to rest on a grateful branch, and her fingernails scrape deliciously against the skin of his palm… only for her to retreat, with her lady's maid and Giovanni's nurse, to her quarters of whatever inn they have rented out for the rest of the evening.
On the fourth day, Lucrezia eschews the carriage. Instead, she has a groomsman saddle up Cesare's destrier for herself.
"I have stolen your horse," she informs him at midday, riding up beside him.
Cesare, who has spent the morning coaxing one of his men's coursers to trust him, finds all his frustration melted away at the golden corona of sunlight glinting off her hair. "You cannot steal what I would freely give."
She spares him a short look. "Ah yes. My brother, ever the soul of generosity."
Cesare snorts. "You know me better than that."
"I know you too well, you mean."
"You do," because what else can he say?
Their horses match strides with one another, settling into an even cadence. "I thought you'd spend this whole trip avoiding me," Cesare says.
"Is that why we're going the wrong direction?"
He shakes his head. "No." Even as he says it, he knows they both can tell he's lying.
Lucrezia's laugh, even jaded and paper-thin, is a sound he could spend — will spend, he knows — his entire life chasing. "Eventually you're going to run out of road, brother," she says.
"We'll see," he tells her, and urges his horse into a canter.
They keep heading east, winding higher and higher into the mountains. The air grows chilly, cold spilling down from the snowpacks of the old, jagged peaks. Each night, Cesare lays out his map and stretches his fingers across the gap between their actual location and the route they ought to be taking. He imagines his hand is splayed over the taut flesh of Lucrezia's hip.
His men shiver in their leather doublets and thin cloaks, but none of them ask him any questions.
On the eighth day, it begins to snow — thick, heavy flakes that seem more like pollen when they settle in Cesare's hair. He wipes them away with a careless hand, and pulls his cloak tighter around his shoulders. Cooped up so long in Rome, he cannot remember the last time he saw snow, and the haze it gradually lends to the landscape only makes him feel more awake. They could be anywhere in the world right now.
"Sir." Ubaldo, his second-in-command, appears alongside his mount. "The carriage won't be able to get much further in this weather."
Cesare looks back — sure enough, the snow has begun to pack into the spokes of the carriage's wheels, and the horses are struggling to find their footing in the deepening drifts.
"We passed a castle a few leagues back," he says. "We'll take shelter there. Ride ahead and let them know we'll be coming."
Ubaldo nods. "Yes, sir. What should I tell them about our party?"
Cesare wheels his horse around, sending up plumes of snow. "As little as possible."
---
The castle is set back against the foot of the massif, its rough-hewn Norman stones nearly the same color as the cliffs that loom above it. A red-and-green flag snaps in and out of sight, obscured and then revealed by the shifting winds.
They're ushered through the gates and into the bailey by two servants, where Ubaldo stands beside a balding man with the helpful, overworked expression Cesare recognizes in all good stewards.
Cesare swings down from his horse; his boots give a satisfying crunch against the snow.
"Thank you for allowing us to stay," he says.
The man gives him a smiling nod, then turns to Ubaldo expectantly.
"I'm sorry, sir," Ubaldo says. "He only speaks Abruzzese."
The man says something in a thick, susurrant tone — Cesare catches the words "your lordship," and "snow," but little else.
"He says his master is away on business in Pescara, but you are welcome to stay until he returns."
"Who does he think we are?" Cesare asks Ubaldo.
"I told him you were a lord of the Romagna," Ubaldo says, which is less of a lie than it was a few weeks ago.
The carriage clatters into the bailey, wheels skidding on the frozen gravel before coming to a halt before them. The coachmen hop down and pull out the mounting steps for Lucrezia, who steps out into the snow, Giovanni asleep on her hip. Somehow she's managed to find a sable, which she's wrapped around her, the brown pelt obscuring the black of her mourning garb. The snow looks almost reverent as it floats down onto her hair, her shoulders.
The steward says something else to Ubaldo, who chokes.
"He says — your lady wife and son are beautiful."
Ubaldo turns to the steward, but Cesare holds up a hand, stopping him.
"Yes," he says, "they are."
--
"Husband," she says to him later.
She'd figured it out without having to be told, although Cesare wasn't sure what had tipped her off. The warmth of his hand into the crook of her elbow, guiding her out of the elements and into the great hall? The romantic smiles on the faces of the two serving girls who'd appeared to whisk her away to warm herself up with a nice hot bath? The way he'd watched her go?
Any of it could have given him away, although none of it was new — he was always looking at her, touching her, even when others could see.
Giovanni and his nurse are in the nursery, with the rest of their party put up in the lower rooms of the keep. It's a drafty old rambling heap of a castle, at least four hundred years old and bearing none of the modern graces of art and architecture that Cesare has come to expect. As he and Lucrezia sit before the fire in the lord's chambers, finishing an actually quite decent meal of lamb and mushrooms, he can hear the wind whistling at the window slits.
(The lord's great bed lies in shadow behind them, untouched but not unnoticed, an island awaiting an explorer's next voyage.)
"Husband," Lucrezia says to him, her wine glass dangling between two of her long, elegant fingers. "What an awful word."
"You don't like it?" he asks.
She squinches her nose, a moue of displeasure so familiar Cesare can transpose this moment over a thousand others, stretching back to the honey-gold days of his earliest memory. "Not anymore. You and Father have seen to that." She stares into the fire, eyes gone distant.
If it would help, he would apologize. He wouldn't mean it, but he would say it anyway. The world has only managed to come up with a few things he would not do for her. He would — and he has, and will again — pull down empires just for the pleasure of laying them out at her feet. A few words are nothing.
As though she knows what he is thinking, her gaze snaps back to him.
"It would be easier, I think," she says. "If I could hate you." She frowns, as if puzzled. "I've spent days trying to. Weeks."
"Why can't you?" he asks.
She gives another of her new, brittle laughs. "Because there's too much of you that's inside of me. And too much of me that's inside of you. We've grown twisted together, like some awful New World monster, heads and limbs and bodies conjoined. And I don't know that we'll ever be able to become separate people."
"Is that so bad?"
She drinks the rest of her wine. "It should be. Shouldn't it?" She turns to him, and her eyes are wide and questioning, the way she used to look when she would ask him where flowers came from, or what God looked like, or if she would ever be as pretty as the Madonna hung in the chapel of their grandmother's home.
Cesare stands, crosses the distance between them. The flagstones have soaked up the heat from the fire; kneeling at her feet, the unexpected warmth punches the breath out of his lungs. He looks up at her and Lucrezia is all he can see: his beloved sister, the softest parts of himself.
"'Should' is for other people," he says. "We are Borgias."
"No, we aren't," she says, pushing her fingers through his curls, guiding his head beneath her skirts. "Not tonight."