She tapped her foot at me, but I kept reading. I sat in the chapel’s rearmost pew, boots propped impiously on the pew ahead, reading Suetonius’s De Vita Caesarum through the colored reflections of the stained-glass window overhead. The Palazzo Santa Maria had its own tiny chapel complete with marble-carved altar and rosewood crucifix and an Annunciation all in panes of blue and crimson glass in the window—but no one ever prayed here, considering that the palazzo stood adjacent to the Basilica San Pietro itself. I sometimes came here to read, if the palazzo rang a little too noisily with female voices to find quiet elsewhere.

“You’re La Bella’s dwarf,” the lovely brunette above me persisted. “That stunted little shadow who follows her about everywhere. Don’t you juggle or tumble or tell jokes?”

“No. And what is the Princess of Squillace doing here without so much as a maid in attendance?”

“I left them outside at the door.” Sancha of Aragon lifted her little Neapolitan nose. “I am here to pray. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, surprising myself. My eyes had not really taken in my book for the past hour. For once, the chapel’s hush had made me think of more somber things than my latest reading, and I had been seeing a face superimposed over my book. A woman’s face, plain and tired and not so very pretty. Made less pretty by the slash in her throat below. A woman now four years dead, and I had not remembered what she looked like in a long time, but I was remembering now.

Mourning? Not really. She hadn’t been a great love of mine; just someone I could call a friend. Not even a close friend. Just a garrulous tavern girl with a sweet voice, who had been kind to me. But I had few enough friends of any variety, and when this one died I’d thought to avenge her. Dwarves have foolish notions.

Anna. That was her name. Worth remembering, even if I couldn’t avenge it.

But I had no desire to voice any such thoughts to hard-eyed Sancha of Aragon, who would not care anyway, so I just made an airy gesture. “I may be here to pray, Madonna Sancha, but you’re not. What man are you meeting?”

“Get out,” she snapped.

“No,” I said. “If I leave here I’ll have to go back to La Bella, and she’s having her hair dressed, which not only takes an eon, but she’s reading those wretched Avernus sonnets aloud to the maids and everybody’s sighing. All in all, I’d rather be dead.”

“Avernus?” Sancha wrinkled her nose. “What’s that?”