“No, I’m quite comfortable,” I lied. The mists had cleared from my eyes a little and I could see Pantisilea sitting against the far wall tearing up a gauze shift to make bandages. Through the vestry door I could see movement: Madonna Adriana slumped in a chair with Laura in her lap and the nursemaid fussing. I twisted my head to where my mistress sat beside my pallet and looked her over. “Are you going to a party?” She wore her finest gown, heavy cloth-of-silver girdled with a sapphire-studded chain, and every jewel she owned had been latched around throat, wrists, fingers, waist. She looked expensive and gaudy, overdressed and vain, and it didn’t suit her.

“I’ve been invited to dine.” Her smile was a twisted, tilted thing. “With the French officers.”

“They’ll strip those jewels right off you.”

“They’re welcome to the lot.” Madonna Giulia looked down at herself. “I want them to see just how much the Pope has spent on me. What he’ll be willing to spend to get me back, if they’ll just agree to ransom me.”

We hadn’t spoken so cordially in weeks, my mistress and I—not since she’d slapped me for insulting Orsino Orsini, and before that when I’d been cruel to her in Pesaro for no particular reason other than the fact that I felt like it.

“I haven’t had a chance to thank you,” Giulia said, “for defending me.”

A tongue of flame flared up in the brazier, and I focused on it. “Don’t thank me, Madonna Giulia.”

“I will,” she said fiercely. “All your injuries—why did you do it, Leonello? You couldn’t have beaten them, there were too many and you had only so many knives. Why?”

“I was hired to protect you. So I tried.” I shrugged as best I could while lying flat on my back and piled with blankets that were beginning to weigh on my chest like stones. “Besides, I don’t like the French. They’re rude, they stink, and if one small man can make a few of them wish they’d stayed on their own side of the mountains, then so much the better. Well worth a few shattered ribs.”

She looked at me. “That’s truly why you did it?”

“Perhaps I was also making amends.” I gazed up at the arched ceiling of the vestry again. A spider was spinning a web there, not caring about the little man lying below and possibly dying. “I am sorry I called you a whore, Madonna Giulia. In Pesaro.” I hate making apologies, and I fumbled the words. I hate fumbling, too. “When I get in a temper—I need to cut someone, even if only with my tongue. You were there.”