I’d meant what I told Marco that first morning, sitting in those cramped little kitchens. I can’t go back. If I’d just stolen from my father—well, I’d likely be returned for whatever punishment he deemed fit. But a desecrator of church altars wouldn’t be forgiven. I didn’t know what punishment they had in Rome for desecrators, but I’d heard how other thieves of God had been treated. I could be strung upside down from a public gallows, hanging there while the crowds threw rocks and rotten vegetables at me, until the blood burst inside my head.

And if they found out just who I was—what I had been in Venice—well, I’d be shipped back there, to La Serenissima and the hands of my enemies. And I’d face a far worse punishment than hanging upside-down on a public gallows.

I shivered at the thought, tasting the sour tang of terror in my mouth again, and crossed myself as I looked at the dark shriveled thing in the nest of clothes. I certainly couldn’t throw it away like trash, but what did I do with it? I’d thought of leaving it at a shrine or an altar somewhere—but relics in the Holy City are a hundred to a scudo; likely the hand would just have been tossed away as rubbish. I couldn’t send it back to the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice, either; not without giving myself away.

I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with the thing.

I had to steel myself to touch it with my bare hand. I could cut a lamb’s throat for the kitchen spit as briskly and unsentimentally as any man; I could plunge my hand into a mass of still-steaming pig guts and empty them out for sausage casings; but I flinched as I picked up the withered hand and laid it on my bed. It felt dry and wrinkled to the touch, like a raisin.

I hesitated, then dropped to my knees beside it. It might not be my patron saint’s true hand, but it had still been sacred to her, a relic of her church. If I gave my prayers to it, she would hear me. Only, what was the proper prayer to a saint whom you have robbed and desecrated?

“Santa Marta,” I said finally, “don’t be angry with me. You know I couldn’t—you know I had to leave.” I was glad I didn’t have to get into that part of my story—the small matter of who I was. Being sanctified, Santa Marta would just know that without me having to go through all the sordid details. “I’m sorry I had to steal from you, I didn’t mean—”

I stopped. This wasn’t going well at all.