“Would you have killed me for it?” Cesare sounded curious, looking down at me, ignoring his sister’s cheering from the dais and Sancha’s imperious calling of his name. “If I’d done it?”

I hesitated. For Anna I’d killed the other two men who had been present at her death—but Anna was four years in her grave, and I could scarcely remember her face. It had been the chase that spurred me since then, not revenge. Boredom, not outrage. Perhaps that was ignoble, but a dwarf cannot afford nobility. “Probably not,” I said at last. “I am fond of living, after all, and the Pope would not look lightly on me for killing his son.”

“No. The Holy Father and I may not always see eye to eye—he will not give me his army to lead, and he will strike me across the face for daring to say that my brother is an incompetent ass.” Cesare slid his sword back into its scabbard. “But as much as my father and I quarrel, he would never allow anyone to harm me. Even if I had killed and raped your whores.”

I started back toward the dais. “How fortunate you didn’t, then.”

Cesare smiled faintly, leaning down to whisper in my ear just before vaulting up into the arms of his sister and sister-in-law. Just a handful of words, but they froze me in my tracks.

“Leonello!” My mistress’s pale face leaned down from the height of the dais. “Guards, lift him up, it’s too tall—Leonello, what were you thinking! It’s bad enough watching the poor bulls die; you think I want to see you die, too?”

“Apologies, Madonna Giulia,” I said woodenly, allowing the guards to lift me up by the arms. They were laughing and ruffling my hair in the way I hated, telling me how funny I looked waddling after a bull, but I barely heard them. My ears buzzed; my legs had turned wobbly as Carmelina’s savory jellies, and my chest had gone cold as one of her Spanish ices.

Two short sentences in Cesare Borgia’s devil whisper.

I did not kill your whores, he had whispered. But I know who did.

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

Into the endless screaming fall of dark

She tumbles, lovely daughter of the earth,

Her golden light extinguished in its birth.

A pomegranate stains her: prey and mark.

—AVERNUS, FROM SONNET IX: AURORA AS PERSEPHONE

Giulia