“I wouldn’t mind a few more,” one of the other maids said, and the odd uneasy silence cracked. Guilty giggles rippled through our little circle as the chatter began to flow again. Madonna Giulia tilted her head back, damp blond hair sliding on its wide hat brim, and began wiping the flaking mask off her face with a damp cloth.

“Let’s get ourselves prettified for Viterbo, shall we?” she suggested in a brighter voice. “It’s just the place for a romantic tryst—love among the summer breezes, with the scent of flowers everywhere! Pia, you need a good thyme and fig mask to cool that sunburn you got at the market . . . Pantisilea, the mint and rosemary bleaching paste if you really want to whiten up those teeth against that lovely olive complexion . . . and Carmelina, cucumber-parsley milk with a hot towel compress, infallible for soft skin . . .”

My mistress sounded relieved to be moved on from the thought of grim things like daggers in the night. But I looked up then and I saw Leonello, standing halfway down the steps into the garden as though he’d frozen in place. He was not smiling.

“Taking up eavesdropping now?” I demanded, scraping the last of the mask off my face. But he looked at me expressionlessly, and then he turned and reversed out of the garden.

Leonello

The masked man melted toward me from the vaulted shadows.

I jerked upright on my stone wall bench, breath freezing behind my teeth. He found out, I thought inconsequentially. He found out I was asking questions, heard I was making inquiries about the women who died staked to tables. Curiosity was said to kill cats; what would it do to dwarves? Dio.

I wondered if the masked man would pin my palms to the floor with knives too, before he pulled my head back by the hair to bare my throat.

My thoughts might have frozen, but my hands did not. The finger blade at my wrist cuff popped into one hand and the knife tucked into my boot top leaped into the other as the man in black came padding noiselessly toward me, eyes glittering behind the half mask.

“Don’t kill me, little lion man,” Cesare Borgia said from behind the mask. “My father would not thank you for that.”

The Pope’s son tossed his mask aside, revealing the familiar lean Borgia face. Even with the mask, I should have recognized the neatly clipped auburn beard, the lithe serpentine grace, the ever-present shadow behind him who was blank-eyed Michelotto. Just Cesare Borgia, I thought, but my hands would not relinquish the Toledo blades. I had to force the knife back into its boot sheath, and when I looked down I saw my fingers were trembling.