The crowd must have roared again, but I did not hear it. I only heard the steady thumping of my own heart as I stood at Cesare Borgia’s side. He retrieved the bloodied sword from his expressionless man-at-arms Michelotto, as I reached for my own weapons. I had a full set of ten throwing knives: finest Toledo steel with intricate damascened hilts, ranging from the long dagger at my waist to the little inch-long blades that could be tucked inside a wrist cuff. Presented to me as a gift from Cesare Borgia, when he first hired me as bodyguard to his father’s mistress. I reached for the pair of blades tucked in my boots, and I had six inches of gleaming Spanish steel in each hand. My wounds from the French had left me with more lingering aches and pains than I used to endure, but my feet were still fleet—and my four-fingered hand could throw knives as fast as ever.

Across the arena, the bull raised its huge baleful head at us.

“Bulls are quicker than they look,” said Cesare, conversationally, as though we sat idling over a chessboard. “Don’t retreat backward when he comes at you. Dodge sideways instead.”

“Noted,” I said, and we split away, one to each side, as the bull came for us in a rush of hooves. It turned for Cesare, a storm of death behind two vast horns, and as the Pope’s son melted to one side like a lithe shadow, I gave a shout and sent one of my blades winging into the bull’s rippling slab of a shoulder.

Surely only a pinprick to a maddened beast, but a pinprick it felt. The bull whirled, quicker than a cat as it thundered toward me, and distantly I could hear the crowd screaming at me to run, run, but I did not want to run. I wanted to fight. I bounced on my toes, feeling the blood rush in my ears, and perhaps I was a liar all those years when I said I didn’t tumble, because I dived to one side as neatly as though I’d been tumbling all my life. I felt a reminiscent ache from the wound a French pike-man had given my shoulder, but the pain seemed very distant.

Among the roaring of the crowd I heard a woman’s cry from the dais as the bull missed me by inches, one massive hoof clipping down beside my shoulder. Perhaps Giulia; she was surely the only one watching who cared even remotely if a bull trampled me to death. She’d tasted like sweet honey and cool water; not a bad taste at all to die on. From everyone else in the stands around her, I heard roars of laughter. A dwarf taking on a bull; what could be funnier than that?