“Montefiascone. The vestry of the Basilica of Santa Margherita.” A bright jeweled blur moved to my side, and I blinked again, trying to dispel the clouds. Eyes, eyes, what was wrong with my eyes? I’d been stabbed in the chest and side and the hip, maybe the shoulder too, but not the eyes, so what was wrong with them?

“General d’Allegre offered to move us to warmer quarters, but I thought we might be safer on holy ground,” the voice went on. “I had blankets and braziers and fuel brought here, and moved us all into the vestry and the smaller chapels to get us out from under those open rafters.” Giulia Farnese’s face came slowly into focus. “How is the pain, Leonello?”

“Some moments are more agonizing than others.” There was pain in my shoulder, pain in my side, pain in my hip; dull pain that chewed at my bones like a patient beast, and I could feel the stab of broken ribs with every breath. There was a rustling feeling in my chest as though my lungs were filled with parchment, and when I spat to one side I saw blood. That is not at all good, I thought distantly, but it was my hand that hurt the worst. I lifted it up for closer examination, and it hardly even looked like a hand anymore. The French had stamped on it, trying to get me to let go of my knives, and every finger was broken. The littlest finger skewed off at an angle so strange it hurt my eyes just to look on it: purple and mottled and queerly flattened. “How fortunate that I don’t need a little finger to throw knives,” I managed to remark. “The others might survive with a little splinting, but not that one.”

“I’m trying to get you a surgeon,” my mistress said. “The French have refused—it’s all excuses; they’re just humiliated you took down so many of their men.” She let out a flat obscenity better suited to a stable boy than a pope’s mistress, and I would have laughed but it hurt too much. Dio, but it hurt. “Can I make you more comfortable?” La Bella went on. “A cup of wine, another blanket—”