“I don’t fancy commanding an army, Your Eminence,” I said at last. “I don’t like sitting at the back and letting others do my killing for me. If murder must be done, I do it myself.”

“So do I.”

And when was the last murder at your hands? I thought. The question that had taunted me on and off, all winter, all through the turn of the year and the warming of spring, ever since I had played chess in Viterbo with a man who had tossed a mask aside to reveal he was the Pope’s eldest son. When did you last see life fading from a pair of eyes, Your Eminence? Might it have been a tavern girl staked to a table?

If I had kept up my quest after killing Don Luis and the Borgia guardsman, hunted for the masked man with whom they had gone whoring . . . if I had found that man and pulled his mask aside . . . would that face too have been the Pope’s eldest son? As if it were a question I could ever ask, or a murder I could ever avenge, even if I had the answer.

I still wanted the answer, all the same. Though part of me hoped it wouldn’t be Cesare. I rather liked him, after all. I owed him my life, and my knives, and my current prosperity. And besides which, he made an excellent partner in chess.

Giulia was laughing again, and it jerked me out of my dark thoughts. “—what do you think, Leonello?”

I blinked, collecting myself. “What do I think about what, Madonna Giulia?”

“What do you think of Lord Sforza’s new sonnet, of course! The one in Lucrezia’s honor—”

Lucrezia preened. She must have doubled back to halt her little jennet beside Giulia’s mare while I stood lost in my semiheretical speculations about her favorite brother. “My lord husband compares me to the goddess Primavera,” the Pope’s daughter sighed. “So very romantic—”

“If you will excuse me, madonna,” I said hastily. Lord Sforza’s leaden little verses had made their way all over the palazzo, at least to those not quick enough to flee when the love-struck little Countess came looking for an audience for her lord’s latest ditty. I hunted about me for an escape and caught sight of a familiar black head at the front of another wagon rolling past. “Madonna Giulia, I think I shall ride with the cooking equipment. Better pans than poetry—”

Signorina Cuoca gave an inhospitable sniff as I was boosted up to the boards beside her. “Ride somewhere else, Messer Leonello. Somewhere you’re wanted.”