Poetry. The final refuge of lovelorn fools. I’d penned all those sonnets in one savage fortnight, after we had been ransomed from the French and I had been recovering from my wounds. Every day Giulia had tended me, seen my bandages changed and scolded me into drinking foul medicines and read me books to pass the time. She’d been kneeling beside my bed one afternoon, deftly adjusting the pillows under my head, talking in her sweet way of anything that would distract me from my pain, and she’d been so close . . . I’d nearly reached out to tilt up her chin with one hand, nearly captured her eyes with my own and said—God knows what I would have said. Horror at that near miss had made me cruel to her instead, snarling at her till she withdrew in hurt bewilderment, and then afterward I wrote poetry for her. She’d once said ruefully that no one wrote poetry to harlots, but I did—a dwarf’s pathetic homage to his unchaste muse. Poetry in the name of Aurora; the dawn bringing light to my darkness, oh God, how unbearably trite. I’d mocked myself viciously with every line, but all the scorn I’d heaped on my own head hadn’t stopped the words coming.

I’d had one copy printed under the name of Avernus—the entrance to the underworld! How very dark and mysterious!—and I’d hoped I could inveigle her into reading it. Cheap thin verse on cheap thin paper, hardly readable considering I’d had it done up by the half-drunk printer in the Borgo who made most of his living printing scurrilous pamphlets, the printer whose spare room I used to rent before I came the Borgia household. She’ll laugh at it, I’d thought when I looked at my poor offering. Good. Hearing her laugh at it would surely cure me.

But she hadn’t laughed. She had loved it, my pathetic little collection of sonnets, loved it more than Petrarch’s sonnets to his Laura, she said. She’d loved them and sighed over them and read them aloud to anyone who would listen, and soon everyone in Rome was quoting my stunted private passions back and forth to each other.

Even that bitter shame had not stopped me from writing a second batch.

I scrabbled the pages of new sonnets away in frantic haste, but Giulia’s eyes had already widened. “Leonello, don’t go. Please don’t go, I—”

“I wouldn’t stay if you spread your legs for me right now,” I grated, and slung my pack over my shoulder. Maybe it would look suspicious to some, my flight so soon after Juan’s death, but so be it. I wouldn’t stay here to see Giulia’s pity—I would rather die on the rack than bear that. So I took a jagged breath, and turned my back on her.