“Bartolomeo—” I felt a wave of such weariness, leaning against my chamber door. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to cry. My erstwhile apprentice just looked at me, his eyes warm as cinnamon and his body even warmer as we stood in the close shadows beside my door. He wanted to kiss me so badly, I could see it in his eyes, and my stomach gave a viscid roll because I thought I would shriek and shriek and shriek if I ever felt any man’s hand on me again.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I blurted. “Stop it, you hear me? Because I’m a nun, Bartolomeo, I’m a nun. I was called Suora Serafina and I hated her, but just because I ran away from my convent doesn’t mean I ever stopped being her. Suora Serafina can’t marry you, because you’d lose your life for violating a Bride of Christ, and that’s why I kicked you out of your own bed like a stray dog after we—I had to; I had to, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. So will you stop looking at me like that and just—just go find someone else to moon over? Someone good, like you. Someone who deserves you. Please just go away.”

My eyes had blurred all over again, so I couldn’t see what expression was on his face. Surely revulsion. A boy with not a stain on his soul, not a sin on his conscience that couldn’t be confessed to his priest, and I’d made him a despoiler, an adulterer against God Himself. Surely he had to be thinking that.

But Bartolomeo just picked up my hand, the wounded one, and his kitchen-rough fingers brushed very lightly over the bandage. “Go lie down,” he said. “I’ll finish cena. Then I’ll make you a hamper to take to the convent.”

And as I shot the bolt on my door and toppled trembling into bed, I could hear a man’s authoritative voice in the kitchens, calling out, “Dear God, Ugo, venison in royal sauce and stuffed fingers of veal and gilded capirotata? Who do you think you’re feeding, the King of France?”

Strangely comforting, that voice. I fell asleep to the sound of it, and I did not dream of Juan Borgia.

Leonello

I will kill you.

Words most of us have spoken at one point or another in our lives. Usually in the heat of a quarrel. Few of us mean it. What happens when you do mean it?

A question I’d gone to the roof of the palazzo to ponder, throwing my knives over and over the length of the loggia as the sun sank in the sky beside me. Below I heard the rumble of cart wheels in the streets, the clop of hooves, the shouts of vendors packing their wares for the night, shopkeepers shuttering windows and latching doors. The smells of night soil, mud, horse manure, the stink of the river in summer’s heat rising even as high as my loggia. I will kill you. I’d seen those words in Juan Borgia’s eyes when he last looked at me, and now I said them to him, silently, as I threw my blades into the makeshift target where I still performed my daily hour of practice.