My biggest blade winged sweetly through the air, burying itself hilt-deep through the bull’s heart. A dying beat of that heart later, Cesare’s sword struck the bull’s head half off in a single stroke.

The beast fell between us with a crash that sent dust billowing up like the roars of the crowd. Laughter mixed with those roars—laughter for me, of course. In the ancient days when Rome was an empire, dwarves had fought and died in the great arena of the Colosseum, tossed to lions or pitted against teams of cripples and half-wits. Palate-cleansers between the big gladiatorial fights. I wondered if those dwarves had heard these same hoots of laughter as they died.

The shouting faded in my ears to soundlessness, the laughter to an empty ringing. I stood locked eye to eye with a pope’s son, both of us panting hard, with a dead bull and a river of blood between us. “My kill,” I said.

“Mine,” he said. Both our chests heaved like a forge’s bellows. “I took the head.”

“After I stopped the heart. My kill.”

“Our kill,” he allowed, and bent to wipe his blade clean along the bull’s hide. My knives were buried in that same hide, thrown one at a time, and I dropped to my knees to yank them free.

“Will I get my answer?” I said. With the heady rush of excitement fading I felt the sweat soaking my shirt and cooling rapidly in the winter breezes; a sting in my elbow where I had knocked it rolling sideways; the ache in my thighs that protested all the sprinting and tumbling. Deeper, more distant pains in my chest and hip, more long-healed wounds from the French. “Did you kill those women?”

“I know the ones you speak of,” he said. “And I did not kill them.”

Strange that I believed him, when a moment ago I had been so ready to think him guilty—but I did believe him. He could kill without blinking, that I was sure of—but lie about it? Not to a lowly dwarf, anyway. He would have flung it in my face just to see the look in my eyes.

“Pity,” I said, sliding the last of my little blades home into its boot sheath and rising. “I thought myself so clever for tracking you.” Though I should have known, really—how could he have killed that one girl, when he had been at odds with his father in the Vatican over Giulia Farnese being held for ransom? Cesare Borgia was merely a pope’s bastard, after all, not the Devil himself. No matter what he said. As for the dagger, it could easily have been stolen and used against him, to attach foul rumors to the Borgia name.

Foolish dwarf.