“We should have delayed longer, Leonello,” she was fretting. “You aren’t fit to travel yet, no matter what the surgeon said!”

“Two days of that swill the French call food was quite bad enough, Madonna Giulia. More would have killed me.” It took every ounce of concentration I had to speak coherently around the sluggish, pain-filled exhaustion. My tongue might as well have been made of stone.

“Was it really only two days?” Giulia stroked her daughter’s golden head where it slumbered against her shoulder. Little Laura wasn’t two years old yet, but even she had felt the tension of the past few days, clinging to her mother like a limpet. “It felt like a year.”

“Thanks be to the Virgin, I spent most of it unconscious.” Or perhaps it was Santo Giuliano the Hospitaller I should thank in my prayers; he had a soft spot in his heart for killers like me. I’ve killed more than Frenchmen in my day, and for darker reasons than the defense of the Pope’s mistress.

The carriage felt stuffy, and I reached out my splinted fingers to nudge open the shuttered window. A wave of pain flashed through my hand, and I had to bite down savagely on the inside of my cheek. French boots had stamped on that hand, trying to get my knife away—every finger was broken, and the littlest finger gone altogether. The French surgeon had made a clean, cauterized stump of the mangled thing at the same time he had splinted my other fingers, probed and cleaned my wounds, drained blood and excised bone splinters, purged and bandaged and did whatever else surgeons did to keep their victims alive. It must have worked, whatever he did while I was unconscious, because I was no longer bleeding from every orifice. Most of my hurts had faded into a dull roar of pain limping along below the surface—all except the hand. It was the chest wound that nearly killed me, but somehow it was my mangled hand that hurt the worst, a bright white-hot flash of agony every time I moved.

It doesn’t matter, I reminded myself whenever I looked at my remaining splinted fingers. You don’t need a little finger to throw your knives. My knives had been returned to me—with elaborate French compliments, of course, for my bravery. May God rot them all.

My mistress caught the flash of pain across my face. Of course she did—she was a whore, after all, even if she did have only the one illustrious patron, and she could read men as easily as I read the pages of my favorite books. “Your hand—”