Bartolomeo made a desperate empty-handed lunge, but the French soldier backhanded him almost casually out of the wagon. I saw the glint of armor outside, soldiers dismounting, soldiers everywhere, and I made a last frantic fumble in the crate, but my knives, my cleavers, my sharpened spits and basting needles all slid through my sweating fingers. I lunged with my nails instead, but the Frenchman backhanded me too, on my already swollen and black-bruised face, and the blow made the inside of my head light up with sparks. Dimly I felt a rough hand seize my hair, then collapsed as he dragged me forward, felt the tailboard at my knees, and collapsed again into the dust of the road as he shoved me out of the wagon to the ground.

Half the maids had tried to flee the cart ahead, and a trio of French soldiers hemmed them in like dogs herding sheep, pricking them with pike points and laughing as they screamed. The other soldiers were picking more professionally through the wagons or herding back the guards they’d subdued, directed by what I assumed was a captain in blue plumes and mirror-bright helmet. Three or four of our guards still fought in a ragged line before Madonna Giulia’s carriage, but her horses had already been slashed loose from the harness and goaded away, leaving the carriage stranded like a ship run aground on a rock. The captain of our guard lay crumpled by one canted wheel, blood still pulsing slowly from the great slash in his throat. Bartolomeo lay facedown in the dust not an arm’s length from me.

The soldier who had shoved me out of the wagon gave me one cursory glance but just spat in the dust and went back to rummaging among the crates. Perhaps I should thank my father for hitting me, I thought idiotically, feeling the throb of my swollen face. He’s made me so ugly even the French don’t want to rape me. So much for Leonello’s prediction.

Leonello had made other predictions, too. That the French were close, only a short distance away on the Montefiascone road. The road we’d taken only because I’d talked Madonna Giulia into traveling a different way from my father’s party. My fault, all of this, God forgive me, it’s my fault, it—

“Bartolomeo?” I crawled to my apprentice where he lay still, his hair almost as bright against the white road as the trickle of blood from our fallen guardsmen. “Bartolomeo, sit up. Sit up, I did not spend a year teaching you to cook only to have the French murder you in a road! Sit up and tell me what goes in a zabaglione, sit up, please—”

He was so still. Behind me a woman screamed on a rising note, underlaid by that snickering French laughter. My fault, my fault.