Orsino started so violently he dropped his goblet. The wine spilled across Caterina Gonzaga’s sleeve and she cried out, but the cry was lost in another shout from just outside the chamber. “No, I beg you—”

Sandro had already shot to his feet, thrusting me behind him, but over his protective arm I saw the handsome young man who staggered into the chamber leaving a trail of blood droplets across the patterned marble floor.

“Your Holiness,” he gasped, staggering toward Rodrigo on his throne, and the papal guards moved but Cesare was there first, disappearing from his dark-haired beauty and her chessboard, and reappearing with sword drawn at the foot of his father’s throne. “Perotto,” he said in some exasperation, and I recognized the young man then. I’d seen him about the Vatican often enough these past months, when he hadn’t been occupied running the Holy Father’s messages to Lucrezia in her convent. One of Rodrigo’s papal envoys, a young Spaniard who had endeared himself to the Holy Father with wit and swagger and charm. Handsome as well as charming, so I’d been careful never to look at him because Orsino saw all handsome men as rivals. Pedro Calderon, nicknamed Perotto, his charm all gone now, his mouth a dark agonized hole as he clutched at his shoulder. A shoulder with a knife hilt in it, I saw with glass-sharp clarity, and for the first time in my whole healthy life I thought I might faint. My knees buckled, because I knew that knife with its damascened hilt. I’d seen it quivering in the center of practice targets; I’d seen it core apples and crack nuts and whittle wood. Once I’d borrowed it to slash through a knotted lace on my sleeve. And I’d seen it snuff the life out of three brutal-faced French pike-men.

“Apologies, Your Eminence.” I heard a familiar deep voice from the doors. “He was warier than anticipated, and I’m afraid a good deal too fleet for my short legs.”

The whole chamber seemed deathly frozen, looking at the small man standing in the doorway. A small man in black, gently tapping another damascened knife against one thigh as he flicked a speck of blood off his collar. The Holy Father was agape. Only Perotto moved, gasping and trembling at the foot of the Holy Father’s throne.

“Your Holiness,” he began, and Cesare turned in one casual movement and ran him through.