That night, my fingers sparked flame after flame inside my sketchbook. I didn’t even stop for my usual sleeve-and-wrist routine; I just flipped pages and kept drawing. “Before the night’s out, I’ll have all of the remaining walls in the papal library captured in these pages,” I whispered to Margherita as I caught Bramante bending over his notebook with a group of aspiring architects watching him draw. While others dined on cured meats, herb tarts, and fried cheeses, I feasted on faces and colors: a woman, wearing watermelon red, gaped at a life-sized dancer made out of sugar; four men debated whether the blue-and-green peacocks were alive or stuffed; a couple fed each other balls of golden saffron bread. (I drew so much, I didn’t have time to eat. Besides, with Felice della Rovere in attendance, I was still worried about poison so didn’t even taste the veal drowning in truffle sauce, one spoonful of which probably cost more than my entire set of rooms.)

“This banquet was an impressive display of wealth,” Pope Julius said, as servants cleared away dishes. “But it’s nothing if you hang onto the same old plates year after year. A man as wealthy as you should commission a new set of dishes with every meal same as you slaughter a new pig.”

We all chortled as if it were the first time we’d heard that joke from the pope, but Chigi leaned forward as if at a negotiating table with a warring duchy. “And if I were to take you up on your challenge this year and prove my wealth in such a manner, would you grant me a request?”

Pope Julius picked up his plate: a mythological scene painted with a heavy hand of ultramarine and rimmed with gold. “You’d throw away your dishes?”

“Who needs such trifles?”

“What’s the request?”

“A game.”

His Holiness’s eyes narrowed. We’d already enjoyed jousting, pig-rolling, and a Barbary horse race through the courtyard. “Another game?”

“In the spirit of Carnevale.”