“The boots were the hardest,” Madonna Giulia said, retying the laces of my sleeves so that just a touch of the shirt’s blinding white showed at my shoulder. “I had the boot maker copy them from your old pair, with a few improvements. The soles are reinforced with extra support under the arches, and there are struts to stiffen the inner seam up to your knee.”

My feet, I could already feel, would have to walk a good many hours before they began to hurt in these supple boots.

“There, test the arm—too binding? I know you’ll want full range of motion through the shoulder if you’re to throw your knives.” Madonna Giulia stepped back, nodding as I swung my arm. “I’ve had four doublets made for you. This black velvet for lavish occasions, a good stout black linen for everyday summer wear, black wool for everyday winter—and a black leather for travel, or times you want more protection. I remember you saying sturdy leather is a good ward against a blade.”

My eyes stung, blurring the image in the mirror. That image showed a cool shadow of a man, stark and unsmiling, somber and dangerous, eyes shifting from their undistinguished hazel to a startling green when contrasted against so much black. I looked—I looked— Dio. “‘Handsome’ seems a stretch of the truth,” I managed to say.

“I don’t think so.” Giulia tilted her head in the mirror. “Your father must have been a good-looking fellow, I think.”

“No, not really.” My father had been far too worn and frayed about the edges, too battered by life for good looks.

“Your mother then—did she give you that dark hair?”

“I don’t know. I never met her.”

“I’m sorry.” Giulia’s voice was instantly contrite. “God rest her soul.”

“She didn’t die. She might live yet, for all I know.” There were gloves to go with the rest of my outfit; softest leather embroidered again with the bull and keys. “My mother was a whore, you see, and normally she wouldn’t know which of her clients put the baby in her belly. But by the time I was a few months old, she could see it must have been the dwarf, the one who juggled apples and walnuts in the mountebank show in the Borgo. He paid her double, see, to look past his deformities and give him the occasional tumble . . . She left the freakish baby with its freak father, and then she left altogether.”

There was a little silence. I didn’t meet my mistress’s eyes in the mirror, just pulled on my new gloves one by one. They fit perfectly, sewn to configure with the odd tridentlike setting of my stubby fingers.

“Your father must have been a kind man,” Giulia Farnese said at last, quietly.

“Why do you say that, madonna?”