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Micheletto has waited for an hour by the time Cesare stalks into the ancient courtyard of the abandoned palace. His stride is carrying, his nod of greeting brief—Micheletto returns it with one of his own. In these few particular moments, he does not avert his eyes, nor bow his head in deference. Cesare tosses his cape onto the plinth of a shattered column, heedless of the debris and dust, and draws his sword. The last light of the sun pours hazy and ruddy through the pillars of the courtyard. Beyond them, the arches of empty windows lead into a shadowed interior.
They drop into their beginning stances, Cesare reverberating with pent-up energy, Micheletto his calmer counterpart. They measure each other with a few sparring passes, limbering muscles, quickening wits, before they begin in earnest. The recent days have taken their toll: the murder of a brother that lies as another dark tether between the two of them, the near assassination of a father, who, Micheletto knows even if he doesn't quite understand, looms large as the world in Cesare's eyes.
Those burdens must fall aside. Micheletto takes a testing swing towards Cesare's flank. Far from a merciless opening, the slash shears past Cesare as he turns upon his heel. He throws himself into a counterattack with barely leashed ferocity. Their blades strum the air and clash together, over and over in sharp staccato repeats until Micheletto wrenches Cesare's sword aside, forcing him to open his guard.
Cesare sways to the side. Then an immaculate bit of footwork carries him forward for a stab. Micheletto's parry leaves the tip of the blade shivering next to his shoulder, halted a finger's width from its target.
"Good." Micheletto tilts his chin. Hs feet slide back into an expectant stance. Back straight, body angled a quarter's worth away from him, Cesare adopts a mirroring posture. Now, it's not merely a concept of the fighter's form that guides the young lord Borgia. The sword in his hand is changing from a crude tool for killing into an instrument as delicate as any used to make music instead of dealing death.
"That's hardly enough," Cesare says with asperity, "now that I'm no longer tripping on a cardinal's robes."
He simmers with some unfinished matter. His father the pope is regaining health and strength, but that seems to animate and vex him in equal measure. Swerving, he drags a tear through Micheletto's sleeve with a snaking thrust. He holds his footing as Cesare presses ever to his left, one dart of his blade at a time.
It becomes a game, all alacrity and intimation: some part of this has always been play to Cesare. He paces around Micheletto. Their sword-points tap together like coy dancers teasing one another; his lunges are light as froth. Micheletto could cut through them with lethal ease.
He doesn't. There's an unfamiliar light in Cesare's mercurial countenance that winks through the clean, mounting rush of the spar. He waits for it to either dim or flare—will grant a moment before he breaks the pattern of Cesare's attacks.
"The armour will sit easy on my shoulders." A gasp punctuates Cesare's word. "Though there is still the matter of my condottieri."
And you, Micheletto, will wear armour and be my captain.
"No." He cannot soften the refusal with my lord. Not here, not in this moment. They move across the remains of a mosaic-laid courtyard, tiles crunching under their boots, the air alive with their blades.
"Ride with me to battle. Train my men, in these arts that the war-masters of Italy would spurn."
Micheletto's sword flickers out towards Cesare's momentarily exposed shoulder. Their footprints blur one another as Cesare shies back, crumbling the grass growing between the tiles, rousing a sudden smell of living green. "Mine aren't a soldier's skills. Your armies will be vast, with horse and shield and lance."
With a snap of Cesare's wrist, the tip of his blade nicks Micheletto's arm. The live steel snatches away a bead of blood before he can deflect the strike, and he can't quite tell if Cesare's sharp exhalation betrays effort or satisfaction.
"You need cannon, not cheesecutters."
"Is that a gibe?" Cesare circles him like a hawk. "I'd have a care as to your choice of levity."
A step too far. Or onto the wrong foothold. Cesare would drag him, too, into the glory that surrounds him like the halo of a dawning sun. Even this sacred, stolen spell stems from the ambition that gnaws at Cesare; the selfsame ambition that, perhaps, steered Micheletto in the palace kitchen the night they first met.
"Forgive me, then." His next offensive comes too heavy, and it is no surprise when Cesare simply ducks away.
"I have no need of your apologies, either." Cesare's sides heave, but neither his speech nor his movements are halting. Sweat glows on his skin.
The problem with Cesare Borgia is that whatever the situation, he's liable to spin it out to his advantage. The candidness of the practice bout works in word as well as deed. Micheletto can do nothing but forge ahead in the course they both have set. "My place is not at the head of an army. Not even one of your making."
"You ask for nearly nothing. The stable loft is all you wish for a refuge." Cesare's word choice is more apt than he may know, but Micheletto only whirls into another series of rapid diagonal blows. They patter down as fast as he can make them, first high to low, then in reverse, his sword a silver line in the air.
"What is it that you want?"
That isn't a question a master would pose to a servant, or a captain to his soldier.
The shadows deepen across the half-covered gallery, with only the occasional fall of reddish light through the gaping roof. Cesare darts a pace to the left, only to have the sculpted sill of a window bump against the back of his shin. Micheletto grits his teeth and seizes the chance. He flies at Cesare to aim a tight, plunging strike between his ribs.
With a shout, Cesare stymies him a blink before his side would have been pierced. He cuts a defensive arc across the space between them, to buy himself the time to half-turn and clamber onto the sill. As Micheletto renews his attack, Cesare flings his sword to the side and hammers a kick down towards his face. A snapping motion of his forearm traps Cesare's ankle in the crook of his elbow.
He shoves.
"Hnh!" Cesare staggers hard through the window frame, but he folds his knee under himself and catches his fall. He has his feet under him by the time Micheletto whisks after him, blade leading. Cesare's only sound is a broken-off gasp as steels jars sorely against steel, and Micheletto feels the other's body tense to thwart the blow, then relax to let it flow on through him. Movement is all. The memory of his own words burgeons in his mind. If you must take the blow, never hold it.
Cesare has learned well.
As if to muster himself, Micheletto inhales deep and dives at his opponent in a flurry of strikes. His sword threads through the tawny light from the window, luring the eye with its flicks and swerves. Cesare's gaze seems to pierce the feint all too easily as he evades.
"What?" Cesare repeats, all the same. "In time, we'll carry the riches of all the Romagna back to Rome. Even that will be only a beginning."
Such dreams. Such visions, and Cesare sees them as clearly as if they were already springing into life from his most cherished and guarded designs. They are drawn in the same flame that will pull men and women to him, to the destiny that he carries, whether knowing or unaware.
"You see far," Micheletto offers. It may be only self-evident. The interior of the old palace casts them both as silhouettes, blurs of shifting blades.
Cesare laughs, more of a throaty hum of sound. The near darkness slows them both, forces them to conserve their motions, to feel their way across the scree-littered floor. Micheletto's sword barely skims Cesare's, and the words pace them more than the swordplay. "And you?"
What does he see? Distance. Open spaces, vast spans far beyond the fields and hills of the peninsula, the fires of sprawling armies in the night. Cesare burns vibrant as a sunrise when the air is heavy with rain. He has gone far in the time Micheletto has ridden along as his faithful shadow, or smoothed the road ahead with a poisoned blade or a gimlet eye upon a threat that may one day rise.
"I—" He launches himself forward. Cesare's face flashes into clarity as he leaps back, into the brighter column of the window, with his eyes wide in surprise. They struggle across sun and shadow, the twilight of the hall further obscured by the dust their whirling footfalls raise.
Then Cesare slices a bloody dash across his wrist, tips his blade to catch on the crossguard of his sword. Hissing, on a reflex of pain, Micheletto lets the sword go skittering across the marble floor. Even in the darkness he can guess at the fierce delight that enlivens Cesare's expression: it's a rare day when he can best Micheletto this overtly. He approaches a step, his blade held level with Micheletto's chest.
Micheletto throws himself back, his sole thought to put enough distance between them that Cesare cannot reach him. The spar sings in his veins with uncommon intensity, threatening to spill past the locks and latches of his control. A tug frees the dagger from his boot, and then he's up again, dashing low at the other. He has to duck inside the circle of Cesare's blade, but only for a heartbeat. As Cesare starts back, trying to set his weapon in between them, Micheletto twists up behind him. The fingers of his left hand make an iron grip about the wrist of Cesare's sword hand.
"Drop the sword." His voice is not much more than a murmur, but Cesare is so close that his racing heartbeat is almost audible. He goes taut. Micheletto nudges the dagger's tip up his throat, so light as to shift with his breath, and presses it at last upon his lip.
Cesare opens his mouth, only to say nothing. One by one, his fingers release the hilt, and the sword rings dully as it falls. They seem to breathe as one man, run ragged, afire with the branding touch of violence. They both pull their blows in these encounters. Blood trickles down from his wrist to soak his sleeve. Micheletto loosens his hold a notch, enough to align his left shoulder with Cesare's right, and lowers the dagger.
"Mercy, from my sweet assassin?" Cesare's amusement is coarse. He runs a hand over his mouth, then glances at it, as if expecting it to come away smudged with red.
"I would not have you bloodied tonight, Cesare Borgia."
A name dropped into the fight. A breach of the voiceless compact. They stand shoulder to shoulder. The lurking laughter in Cesare's eyes grows cold before it can form, eaten away by a more skeptical countenance.
Micheletto's voice stays steady, though something strains it beyond his ken. "Nor any other hour of your life, as long as it may last. Your place is at the head of the vanguard. But I would stand at your back."
Cesare looks at him. It's not a remarkable look, from a man who can command obedience with a mere cant of his head, or weave intrigue around any lordling of the city-states, but it lingers in a way that makes Micheletto drop his hands. He'd back away a step did he not find himself rooted to the spot. Cesare, as if in reversal of his gesture, brings up a rough hand to clasp the back of his head. His head dips until they stand a breath away from being brow to brow. Micheletto holds that breath, holds himself still and silent.
"Do not make a habit of trying my patience." Cesare wrenches away, pushing them both to catch their own balance.
Shaking his head, Micheletto crouches to pick up their scattered weapons. "One might think some patience has been earned, as well, by now."
Cesare hums as he steps up onto the windowsill, the sunset a fading nimbus around him. Micheletto hands him the sword, hilt-first, in a familiar gesture. As Cesare takes a grip and Micheletto relinquishes the blade to him, their fingers meet. And it burns.