“Why, it’s a very splendid pain,” I said airily. “We’ve gotten to know each other very well, really—perhaps I shall give it a name and keep it for a pet when this is all over.” I had been beaten to a pulp by French pike-men, for daring to defend my mistress when French scouts descended like wolves on her traveling party as she made her way toward the Holy City. More precisely, I’d been beaten to a pulp because I’d killed three of those French pike-men and wounded two more before they brought me down, and such men do not like to be humiliated by a man like me.

I am a dwarf, you see. The kind you see in motley at fairs, juggling wooden balls, only I do not juggle and never have. I have the short bowed legs and the oversized head and the broad torso of my kind, but I also have uncommon skill at throwing knives. I can core a man’s throat like an apple at ten paces, and it was for that skill I was hired as bodyguard to Giulia Farnese, the Pope’s golden mistress. If she’d had a strapping youth for a guard, the French would have killed him at once—enemies fasten first on strapping youths when they look for those who might prove a threat. No one bothers to notice the dwarf. Not until I kill them, and then it’s too late.

Though in the end, I suppose it didn’t matter that I’d sprung to her defense. Giulia Farnese hadn’t escaped the French because of my knives. She was going home because His Holiness the Borgia Pope had paid three thousand scudi for her release. The purse had arrived last night, delivered by a messenger who had flogged his horse at a gallop every stride from the Vatican. Just two days in captivity and now we were rumbling back to Rome, a carriage and two wagons escorted through the barren winter countryside by four hundred suddenly gallant French soldiers.

“Are you sure you’re comfortable?” Madonna Giulia was studying me, her dark eyes uncommonly serious. She was the most beautiful woman in all Italy, or so they said: Giulia la Bella, the Venus of the Vatican, the Bride of Christ (when people were feeling rude). Reams of bad poetry had been written to her white breasts, her rose of a mouth, her famous golden hair that cascaded all the way to her little feet when loosed. Men from the Holy Father on down trembled at the sight of her—but I had dogged her footsteps day and night for the past two years; I had seen her squint-eyed with sleep and sneezing from sickness; whimpering in childbirth and cream-faced under her cosmetic face masks of bean flour and egg white, and I rarely noticed her beauty anymore.