Normally I’d agree with her, but I was starting to think Cesare Borgia might have me beaten there. I had traded a few words with him that day when he came to bid his sister farewell—he had handed her up into the carriage with a great deal more affection than he had Giulia, kissing Lucrezia on both cheeks and whispering fondly in the Catalan they all kept for private moments—but after that he had turned aside to me. He wore a doublet and hose, black like my own, suiting him much better than his red ecclesiastical dress, and the dagger with the sapphire in its hilt rode at his hip as it always did.

“Keep my sister safe,” he ordered me, looping his horse’s reins tight about his fingers. “And my father’s little giggler. He’ll miss them both sorely, but he’ll have time to focus now on more pressing matters.”

“Is it true, Your Eminence?” I couldn’t help asking. Rome was a sea of whispers, but the College of Cardinals had all the real news before any of Rome’s commoners. “That the French are massing?”

“Not only are they massing, they are massing a great army.” Cesare Borgia made it sound of no great importance. “The King of France leads them, and he’s the ugliest man in Christendom, but he is no fool when it comes to war. They say he will bring thirty thousand men to press his claim to Naples.”

I gave a low whistle. We had been standing a little apart in the busy courtyard as Lord Sforza rode back and forth dispensing his soldiers first here and then there and the women hung out the window of their carriage, anxious to be gone. I could hear baby Laura crying and Giulia soothing her with a little fragment of song. “And who do we have to oppose them?”

“The papal forces,” Cesare Borgia said. “Such as they are.”

“And who will lead them, Your Eminence?”

I asked the question only to be polite, and he did not answer it. Not with words—but in his eyes I saw such a fire kindle that it startled me. That spark wasn’t just fire, it was lust; a burning, ravenous hunger.

“Who will lead the command against the French?” I repeated.

Cesare Borgia shrugged, bland and remote again, his big black horse nibbling at his sleeve. “Should I suggest you, little lion man? That would be a sight for the French.”

I wondered if I had imagined that clawing beast in his gaze, the thing whose name might be Ambition. I wouldn’t have thought a boy who could call himself a cardinal by the age of eighteen, with more benefices and properties and pensions than he could ever count spilling their bounty at his feet, could be ambitious for anything. What else in the great world was there to want?

There is always something.