“Early this morning,” the man complained. “One of the maids, she comes to light the fires and set the pots boiling at dawn, and what do I hear upstairs? A great wail, and by the time I’m down to take a look, the stupid girl’s gone and emptied her stomach all over the floor!”

Enough to make anyone lose her stomach, I thought. Anna lay on the long trestle table of the kitchens, head tipped back, skirts mussed about her bare legs. Her hands had been spread wide like the figure of Christ on a crucifix, spread wide and staked down to the table with kitchen knives through the palms. She’d still managed to tear one hand free, making a desperate lunging attack. I picked up her free-dangling hand, stiff and cold, and saw blood congealed in dark crescents under her nails. She’d raked her attacker hard.

Good girl.

“This’ll put business off for weeks,” the tavernkeeper grumbled. “Who wants to drink their wine and throw their dice at a tavern where a dead girl’s been staked, answer me that?”

Though maybe if she hadn’t scratched her attacker, he might not have cut her throat. It wasn’t the knives through her hands that had killed my friend—it was the messy slash across her neck, amid half a dozen shallow panicked ones as if the murderer had never cut a throat in his life.

I could have taught you better, I thought. One hand to grasp the forehead, pull the head straight back, and drag the knife across the throat in one straight deep stroke. Dragging it across the throat, that was key—drag it around, and the cut wouldn’t score deep enough. You found that out, didn’t you, whoever you were? Took you four tries before she died.

“Who did this?” I asked quietly.

“What’s it to you? It don’t matter, no one’ll catch him.”

No, probably not. A common girl found in a tavern with her throat slashed—the Tiber filled up nightly with bodies like that. Mostly they were raked up, carted off, and dumped unclaimed into anonymous graves. Who cared? Not the priests, who wouldn’t say a Mass for the dead unless they were paid by some member of the living first. Not the constables, those corrupt swaggerers more interested in loot and bribes than in finding murderers. No one would bother calling a priest or a constable in, not for someone like Anna.

I reached out and closed her eyes, half-open and staring at the knotted rafters. “Who did this?” I asked again.