“Your flying machine?”

Surprise made me forget my momentary fear. “This is the Master’s flying machine,” I protested in no little indignation and scrambled to my feet. “He and my father built it, and you have no claim to it.”

“But it is here in Pontalba now, and so it belongs to us.”

Recalling his uncle’s treatment of him, I wondered at the fact that he claimed loyalty to the duke. Was that blood tie tighter than the bonds of apprenticeship he shared with me? I feared so, for his features had tightened into the same stubborn expression that Davide had worn earlier that morning as he tried to stop us midway to the castle.

But as Davide had wavered when faced with compelling logic, perhaps Tito might also be made to see reason. Or, if I could but give him the means to deflect any guilt from himself, perhaps I might yet retain him as an ally.

“Surely you had no hand in this unsavory plan,” I insisted in as calm a voice as I could muster. “Recall the page, who summoned you in the middle of the night? And what of the three mysterious men you told me about, the ones who held my father tied in a wagon all night while they waited for dawn to smuggle him and the flying machine past the castle guards? Surely these crimes were their fault, and not yours.”

The offer made, I waited to hear him agree that it had all been a terrible mistake… waited to hear him confess that he had somehow been duped by his uncle. That hope, however, was extinguished with his next words.

“There was no page,” he replied and gave a snort that mocked my gullibility. “I told you that, so you wouldn’t question why I believed I’d had a message from Leonardo. And the men were three of my uncle’s soldiers, who came to the castle that day disguised as laborers.

“I even vouched for them,” he added with a grin at his own cleverness. “I told your captain of the guard that they had been hired to assist Leonardo, so that they never questioned the wagon coming in and out.”

Then his grin faded.

“It should have been a perfect plan. How was I to know that Leonardo had chosen that day to leave Milan without telling anyone but your father? I instructed the guards where to find him, told them what he looked like. Fools that they were, they never asked your father’s name but decided he matched the description that I’d given them and took him away.”

Shrugging, he added, “Of course, the kidnapping was but a last-minute solution. We didn’t really need him, not the way I’d planned it. I could have finished building the flying machine myself, if I’d still had all of Leonardo’s notes.”

Leonardo’s notes.

Full realization came to me, so terrible that it stopped the very breath in my lungs. And yet, how could it be? He had been one of us for many months, sharing the same work and the same meals, sleeping but an arm’s length from his fellows. We had given him our trust and our friendship. How could he have forgotten that sort of comradeship, no matter that he was nephew to a duke?

And how could he have betrayed us all by callously murdering the most worthy one of our number?

“It was you,” I managed when I could draw breath again. “You killed Constantin… shot him as he was rushing to warn the Master that you had stolen his notes on the flying machine!”

“No! Constantin was the thief!”

Tito’s indignant response was all the more unsettling for its genuine note of dismay. Giving his head a violent shake, he went on. “He thought he was so clever, the way he watched me when he thought I was not looking… the times he followed after me and pretended it was but chance that we ended up in the same place. I warned him to leave well enough alone, but he would not. And then I found him snooping about in my trunk.”

He referred, of course, to the wooden casket stowed beneath his cot, which was large enough to hold his extra garb and other personal belongings. Each apprentice was assigned one. Though none could be locked, it was a matter of honor that no boy disturbed another trunk without first gaining permission from its owner. The senior apprentice’s suspicions must have been well-founded for him to have broken that unspoken rule.

“That’s when Constantin found the pages you’d cut from the Master’s notebook,” I guessed, earning a careless nod in reply.

“I didn’t bother to deny it, for what good would it have done? Instead, I told Constantin who my uncle was and said that if he forgot all he’d seen and heard, I would make certain that he was well paid for his silence. He pretended to agree, but instead of giving the pages back, he ran off with them. I had to stop him. I-I couldn’t let him ruin my plan.”

He hesitated, as if regretting he’d confessed this much, before he went on. “My uncle had given me a crossbow, as well as the knife. It was lying at the very bottom of my trunk, wrapped in a cloak. I’d almost forgotten I had it, until that moment. I grabbed it up… and I went after Constantin.”

Abruptly, as if his legs could no longer hold him, he slumped from his proud stance into a sitting position on the roof beside the craft.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said in the pat tones of one who was repeating an oft-told tale. “All I wanted was for Constantin to give the pages back, to pretend that he knew nothing. But he ran off to the garden, where I knew the Master was working. I watched him try the gate. When it turned out to be locked, I thought I was saved. But then he started climbing the wall.”

A tear rolled down one cheek as he spoke, and he swiped it away with an angry hand.

“I was too far away to stop him any other way. I-I don’t think I meant to shoot him, not really, but somehow I pulled the trigger. I saw the bolt hit him in the back, and I saw him fall. I waited for someone to come after me, but they didn’t. And so I knew he must have died before he could tell the Master what I’d done. But the worst part was that I no longer had Leonardo’s notes, and so I had to come up with another plan. And that was when I decided to kidnap Leonardo, as well.”

“But why, Tito?” I demanded, unable to hold back my own anger. “Why did you do your uncle’s bidding, when you knew it was wrong? You could have told the Master what the duke was planning, and he would have seen to it that you stayed safely in Milan and never had to return home to Pontalba again. What could your uncle have promised you in return, that you would resort to kidnapping and murder?”

At my mention of his uncle, Tito touched a reflexive hand to his bruised mouth, and his expression tightened. I recalled that his father had died when he was but a boy, so it must have been the Duke of Pontalba who had served in that role for him ever since. Unwilling sympathy momentarily cooled my heated emotions. What must it have been like for him as a child, being left with a brutal uncle whose approval he surely must have craved, while he feared the man himself?

Tito’s gaze met mine again, and he smiled a little.

“You don’t understand. Finally, I had the chance to make my uncle proud of me. He always thought me a fool and a weakling because I loved to paint. The only way he would let me join Leonardo’s workshop was if I pretended to be but a common youth so that I could act as his spy at Castle Sforza. It was my own idea to steal the flying machine and bring it back to Pontalba. When I told him my plan, my uncle promised that if I could accomplish that, I would be the first one to pilot it. And he said that once we built a whole fleet of flying machines for Pontalba, I would be captain over all of them!”

My first instinctive thought was that the duke would never have handed over such responsibility to his nephew; still, from the note of pride I heard in Tito’s voice, I knew that he had believed his uncle’s promise. Taking on such a glorious post would surely have seemed a vindication of all he might have endured at his uncle’s hands to that point.