“You think this is pity?” She looked at me a long moment, and then her face twisted and she averted her eyes. “Then let me tell you something,” she said, and her voice was flat and bitter. “Something that happened when we were taken captive by the French. I saw you settled that first night, and you had so many wounds. So much blood, I could see the life leaking out of you with every heartbeat, but I couldn’t stay with you. I had to go dine with the French general and his officers, and I put on every jewel I had and I flirted with them all. I dazzled them, Leonello, I dazzled them and I got everything I wanted. Extra guards to keep all those lustful soldiers away from the maids, and blankets and wine and a brazier to keep us all warm, and my carriage repaired and my stolen horses returned, and the messenger going to Rome that same night with a ransom demand. I got all of that. But the French general, that smooth bastard, he wouldn’t give me a surgeon for your wounds. He wouldn’t do it, even when I offered him my pearl necklace and all my jewels, and he had a thousand excuses, but what it all came to was that you’d humiliated him. You humiliated his whole army, a dwarf killing three of his precious pike-men without even trying. He wanted to let you die.” She laughed, a tinny sound. “They’d been pawing me all night, all the French officers, kissing my hands, putting their arms about my waist, getting a nibble on my ears, but they didn’t dare anything further. Even General d’Allegre. Until I got on my knees and told him no one would ever know, as long as he did what I wanted. And I did everything he wanted, and after that he gave me the best surgeon in the French camp, and you survived your wounds.”

She lifted her head, and I thought I might see tears on her cheeks. But her eyes were proud and dry, and she met my gaze unflinching. “The one time in my life I’ve ever truly whored myself, Leonello. I didn’t do it for the Pope, or for myself, or even for my daughter. I did it for you. And I’d do it again. I’d do anything to save you pain.”

There was a roaring in my ears, and a vast rage. I could have climbed down and marched on France at that moment, to bury my knives to the hilt in that French general’s eyes. I clutched the rage, welcomed it. Rage was better than the storm she’d lit in me with her words: shame and astonishment, agony and humiliation, and something else that wasn’t possibly hope. It couldn’t be hope; it was far too small and pitiful.

Like me.