“Leonello, let me fetch the guards to carry you down—” My mistress disentangled herself from the Holy Father, her mouth swollen from kissing, and began to fuss over me. I was tempted to bite her head off again, but there was no stopping her when she began to fuss, and anyway I was still too weak to walk under my own power. The wound at my shoulder had broken open, as I could feel even through the bandages, and my hand was throbbing as though some patient sharp-toothed beast were chewing it off. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the blackness behind my eyelids, blackness thick enough to swallow pain. Any pain, even the pain when my litter was awkwardly trundled out of the carriage and carried into the pretty little palazzo beside the Vatican where the Holy Father had installed his mistress in her papal seraglio.

“Madonna Giulia—” Another woman’s voice sounded in my ears, brusque, accented with the crisp tang that belonged to Venice. Though it had been a long time since Carmelina Mangano had seen Venice, and I knew all the reasons why. No wonder she sounded hopeful as she asked, “Messer Leonello—is he dead?”

“No,” I answered in place of my mistress, and opened my eyes. The girl with the Venetian voice hovered beside my litter as it was carried through the palazzo toward my little chamber. A girl of perhaps twenty-two in a plain wool gown with the sleeves rolled up, tall as many men and thin as a kitchen ladle, with a cloud of wiry black curls bundled at the base of a long neck. Tired-looking, because she too had been part of our captured party, and she must have made a dash from the wagon bearing the other servants to catch up with my litter. She was no beauty like Madonna Giulia, but she had a pair of eyes like black fire and she smelled like cloves and cinnamon, and she carried herself tall and proud as a queen. Maybe I stood only a hand-span over four feet, but I had a liking for tall women.

Not this one, though.

“I’m not dying,” I said from my litter, and gave our household cook a grin because I knew it would frighten her. Good. It was her fault I was in this litter to begin with, and I had no mind to be forgiving. “In fact, I’m determined to make a full recovery. I know how that must disappoint you.”

Her face darkened and she stamped off in the other direction. “Bring him a hot posset, Carmelina,” Madonna Giulia called after her, and I closed my eyes again as the guardsmen brought my litter into my chamber and laid it down on my narrow bed. The pain in my hand no longer seemed quite so acute. Perhaps it had been no lie, what I told Carmelina. Perhaps I would make a full recovery.