“I don’t need to put a knife through a man’s eye at twice this range.” Such a distance was also near impossible for my shorter arms, but I was damned if I’d say so. “Any assassin who gets past all the guards on his way to Madonna Giulia will have gotten very close indeed. My kills are far more likely to be made up close.”

“An hour’s practice every day for such a short distance?” Cesare Borgia sounded faintly scornful. “How hard could it be?”

I offered him the longest of my Toledo blades.

He hefted it a moment, giving an easy flip to test the balance, then squinted one eye shut as he measured the distance. He let fly, and swore as the knife glanced off at an angle and clattered to the tiles.

I tilted a shoulder at him. “Try again.”

He waved my second blade off. “I see what you mean about ribs, little man.” He watched instead with hands clasped behind him as I threw my remaining blades one by one, a rhythm I found as easy and soothing as my own heartbeat. “How much would I have to throw until I could match you?”

“Every day.” The finger blade from my cuff went humming, then sank between the first and second ribs. “With large targets and small ones.” The blade from my other cuff hit the space between the second and third ribs. “In the day, and in the dark.” The blade from my boot top; third and fourth rib. “In quiet, and in noise.” My last blade glanced off, and I grimaced. “Like any skill, one has to work at it.”

“Practice on my brother,” Cesare Borgia muttered. “I’ll hang him upside down for you and you can prickle him all you like.”

Muttered asides of a personal nature, when spoken from a nobleman to a dwarf, do not count as conversation and are best treated as though unheard. “I’ve not seen the Duke of Gandia since yesterday,” I said instead. “I imagine you might find him in a brothel. Sowing his oats before the wedding.” The Pope had not been content with one child illustriously settled in matrimony—Juan Borgia had been found a match of his own, a Spanish princess who was cousin to King Ferdinand himself, and the only good thing I could see about the whole business was that the Duke of Gandia would sail to Spain to claim both his bride and his duchy, and thus spare us another gilded excrescence of a wedding here in Rome.

“My brother had better stir himself from his whores, because I need the papal troops and my father will expect Juan to head them,” the Archbishop of Valencia said shortly, and turned to go in a flutter of purple.

“Some trouble in the city, Your Excellency?”