“To put a knife through his throat, as you did with poor Don Luis?” The Bishop leaned forward between two elaborate branches of beeswax tapers, taking a dagger from his belt and laying it down on the desk with its hilt toward me. “Perhaps you would favor me with a demonstration.”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t like being refused.” His tone was mild, but his brows met over the bridge of an eagle nose.

“And I don’t like demonstrating my skills with an inferior blade.”

“It’s Toledo steel.”

“It’s a dagger. Fine for a street fight, but not for throwing.” I was starting to feel lightheaded. Hunger, fear, or danger? I wasn’t sure. “Give me my own knives.”

He looked at me for another moment, then tilted his head at the expressionless guard still standing before the wall. The man fished in his doublet and handed over my set of slim finger knives. “These?”

“Those.” Only two of the four, but I suppose two had been lost in the nighttime chase. I held up my bound hands. “Well?”

“You are a rude little man.” But the young Bishop nodded, and his guard cut my hands free. I took my time flexing my fingers, working the blood back into my tingling palms and massaging my aching wrist where the colorless guardsman had struck me with the pikestaff. The Bishop looked impatient.

“I’m a busy man,” he began.

“And I’m a dead one,” I told him. “Of the two of us, I think my time is the more valuable.” With that I picked up the first of my knives and whipped it past his ear close enough to stir his auburn hair. It bedded itself in the tapestry behind him with a soft thrum.

He never moved. I sent the second knife whizzing after the first, burying it deep in the wall. He turned to look and saw that I’d thrown them so close together that he couldn’t have passed a sheet of vellum between the two blades.

“Impressive,” he said. “Where did you learn your skills?”

“As a child, from a mountebank’s show,” I said. “They wanted me to tumble and juggle. I joined the knife-throwing act instead.”

“More dangerous than juggling.”

“But less humiliating.”

He picked up something from his inlaid desk, and I saw my weathered volume of Cicero. “Unusual for a man of letters to work a mountebank’s show. You read Latin?”

“Poorly.”

“You did not pick up that from a knife-throwing act.”

“No, from school. My father wanted more for me than a mountebank’s show; he thought book learning might get me a post someday as a secretary or a tutor. Pity he was wrong. Why all the questions, Your Excellency? No matter where I learned my skills, flight is not among them, and so I am still bound for the gallows.”