“Because you have too much kindness to have been raised entirely without it, Leonello.”

I gave a bark of laughter, flexing my fingers in the new gloves. Such soft leather; it wouldn’t stiffen my fingers when I needed them nimble on a knife hilt. “No one has ever called me kind before, Madonna Giulia, but thank you. And yes, my father was a kind man.”

Too kind for this world, really. I remember his eyes, worn blue unlike mine, sad and anxious under the belled cap he wore for performing. He drank too much, I suppose, and it made him drop his walnuts and balls when he juggled, but people laughed all the harder so it didn’t matter. And he never raised a hand to me, even when he drank. He’d been the one to insist on schooling for me, though he could hardly manage to pay for it and I was an ungrateful little bastard who didn’t want to go in the first place. “They’ll torment me,” I’d protested. “The other boys!”

“Boys will torment you anywhere you go,” my father said, dragging me along. “And that brain of yours is too clever to waste, Leonello. You could be a tutor someday, or a clerk!”

I wondered if he would be proud of me today. On the whole, I thought not.

Madonna Giulia had dismissed the two maids—“Go see to Madonna Adriana, will you? Tend her if her guts are still grumbling.” The door clicked behind them, and she knelt on the fine woven carpet, her furred gown pooling around her as she sorted through the discarded pile of my old clothes in search of my Toledo blades in their hidden sheaths. “Where is your father now?” she murmured, and began passing me the finger knives one by one.

“Dead.” I slipped the shortest blade into its new home at my wrist cuff. “Some fifteen years dead.”

“What happened?”

“What happens to many of us.” I pushed another knife into its place in my new boot top. “Three drunks at a wine shop. They thought it amusing to kick him about . . . one of them must have kicked too hard. He was spitting blood from inside by the time I returned from my lessons.”

“Did you ever find them? The men who . . .”

“I vowed to find them, certainly. Find them and wreak bloody vengeance, oh yes. But how could I find them when all I had for a clue was ‘three drunks’? Not that it stopped me from trying.” I stretched my lips in a smile. “I was a stupid boy.” Silence stretched between us, then, and I did not want to look at Madonna Giulia. If you say you are sorry for me, I will choke you, I thought. Wrap these new-gloved hands around your pretty throat and squeeze every drop of pity out of you.