“When I can have the pleasure of annoying you?” I propped my boots up on the board beside hers as the wagon lurched into motion again. “Never. What’s that?” I asked, as she buried her nose ostentatiously in a packet of scribbled pages. “Ciphered, I see. Witchcraft? That’s why you fled Venice, isn’t it! Falsely accused by a jealous lover, you escaped a charge of sorcery by bribing the jailor and found no option but to flee to the Holy City!”

She gazed at me, wide-eyed. “How did you know?”

My brows flew up. “Don’t tell me I’ve guessed—” Pointing at the ciphered pages. “Truly?”

“No.” Her too-round eyes relaxed into mockery at me. “They’re just recipes, you dolt.”

“Ah.” I doffed my cap. “Well played, signorina. Pity, I liked that witchcraft theory. Fear not, I have plenty of others. Might you possibly be a Jew, fleeing Spain to escape the Inquisition?”

I chattered on, watching her her fingers drum along her thigh as she pretended to ignore me. We were passing a roadside tavern now; drinkers scrambled up hastily from their trestle tables at the sight of the glittering Sforza banners. One or two fell to their knees; the rest blinked drunkenly. I saw two tavern maids dipping curtsy after curtsy like a pair of apples bobbing in a tub, drinking in every detail of Lucrezia’s dress, Giulia’s hair, the ornate carriage with its matched Sicilian horses and its coat of arms. Not terribly pretty girls, those tavern maids, but all girls looked prettier after enough cups of wine. Like Anna, whose dimple only seemed to get deeper and sweeter the more one drank. Strange how I could barely remember Anna’s face, and yet she burned in my thoughts so constantly . . .

I caught a drift ahead from Giulia and Lucrezia, who had turned their mounts into the grass alongside the road to avoid the dust kicked up by the cart horses. Still going on about the Count of Pesaro’s wretched sonnet. “Hail to thee, O springtime goddess fair—”

You’re going mad, dwarf, I sometimes told myself. Because I had no reason, none at all, to think my masked man was the Pope’s eldest son. Staking a woman to a table had to be the hot-blooded act of a madman—it hardly suited the cool deliberation with which Cesare Borgia moved through life. And surely any murder he committed would be murder with a purpose; the murder of someone who threatened either him or his family or his ambitions. He was so far above Anna and her ilk, they might as well have been beetles under his feet.