The Lion and the Rose (25 page)

I’d missed that silent complicity, during the weeks when he’d been too furious to even look at me. And now he was gone altogether, and he never
had
told anyone about that frenzied, famished hour we’d spent coiled together on the lumpy pallet. The twinge of shame in my stomach had now quite eclipsed my panic over losing my position. Shame for thinking he ever would tell and wreck my reputation. I’d not only bedded him and then—what were his words? Kicked him out of his own bed like a stray dog?—I’d done him the insult of thinking he was a common braggart who would ruin me out of spite.

It did not sit at all well.

“Never mind,” I said to Santa Marta, who I think had liked Bartolomeo because she’d had a habit of falling out of her pouch when he was about. “He was too old to keep on as apprentice anyway. Time he made his own way in the world. If he has a grain of sense, he’ll find some cook with a plain daughter, make his way up the ladder, marry the daughter, and take over her father’s position.”

I brushed away a flash of memory—pale shoulders dusted with freckles like cinnamon and smelling like wild thyme, a long hard body stretched over me, and that was a thought that had returned a touch too frequently to my mind for comfort lately. Perhaps it really
was
well that Bartolomeo had left.

I flicked it out of mind like a dusting of flour off the fingertips and cupped the flame about my taper as I went into the wine cellar. The smell of must and stone, wine and wood; casks in orderly rows with their neat labels in my writing. I kept a far closer eye on the wine stores than Marco ever had—he seemed to think he should leave it all to the
palazzo
steward. “Marco?” I called. “Marco, are you here yet?”

“Maestro Santini’s lent you out for the night,” a male voice slurred from the shadows. “I’ll be the one entertaining you this evening, my pretty.”

I turned and saw a handsome young man leaning against the cellar’s stone wall. Very handsome, in fact; lean and well-built in an embroidered doublet and curly-toed shoes like a Turk, auburn hair falling in his eyes. The Duke of Gandia had already broached one of the wine casks stacked all around us. He toasted me with the cup in his hand, dark eyes gleaming.

Marco
, I thought frozenly. It had been Marco’s writing on the note he sent; I knew it so well. But I was looking at Juan Borgia, and my heart began to thud like clods dropping on a coffin.

Marco, what did you do?

“You’re not really very pretty at all, my pretty,” the Duke of Gandia continued as genially as though he had not noticed my horrified stare. “Not in a gown, anyway. Put you in hose and boots, though—” He gave a leer and whispered, “
Signorina
Giraffe. Or was it a
giraffa
?”

That thrice-damned costume. Why had I ever let Madonna Giulia—and how had he ever recognized—never mind. I pushed both those thoughts aside, giving a wary curtsy with the taper still clutched in my hand. “Gonfalonier,” I said, keeping my eyes on the floor. He liked to be addressed by his military rank now, rather than his ducal title. Oh, the great conquering hero. “I’m sure I do not know what you mean. But if you and your men—man”—yes, just one guard standing impassive against the stone wall beside the cellar door, one of Juan’s uncouth unshaven soldiers—“require refreshment, I will be pleased to see you fed in the kitchens.”

“Why not?” Juan Borgia shrugged, and gave an elaborate bow as I sidled back toward the doors, every hair on my head feeling as though it wanted to stand on end.
Get to the kitchens
, I thought,
get to the kitchens where the lights are. Where people can walk through at any moment.
Anything but this very dim, very empty cellar with its insulating stone walls through which you could hear almost nothing.
Get to the kitchens where the knives are.

But it didn’t do any good, because Juan’s guard seized hold of me the moment I approached. “Bend her over,” Juan said, and I let out an earsplitting yell and began to flail. I knocked the hat off the guardsman and he staggered a moment. I flung myself against the cellar door and got it open halfway, making a desperate lunge, but the guardsman just grabbed my elbow in a grip that numbed my whole arm and hauled me back, cuffing me across the head. My ears rang from the blow, as my skirts were pushed up for the Duke of Gandia’s inspection.

“That’s the bum I remember!” he crowed behind me, and I heard a crash as another jug of wine was smashed open. “Bar those doors, Paolo, and let’s haul her back here where there’s room to work!”

I lunged for the half-open doors again, feeling the pouch-strings at my waist snap, and Santa Marta’s purse ripped away. But the guardsman spun me and shoved me in one motion so I tripped over my own feet and nearly fell as he dropped the bar on the doors. The cellar was freezing even on this warm June night, and I felt my skin shrink and prickle all over. Or maybe that was the terror, as the guard let me go and I came up painfully hard against the trestle table where the stewards decanted wine for
cena
. My gaze flew like a panicked bird around the cellar, but there was nothing here but casks and spouts and decanters. The guardsman had brought several branches of candles—oh, everything had been well prepared—and I had enough flickering light to see the Duke of Gandia stagger toward me. I made myself straighten before him.

“Gonfalonier—”
Eyes on the floor, shoulders rounded, meek and timid; that’s it.
Santa Marta save me, I had no trouble sounding timid. “If you wish me to entertain you this evening, I am pleased to obey.” I forced the words out through dry lips. I’d hoped that if I could just get away, run for the kitchens and disappear into the
palazzo
, Juan Borgia would slouch off in search of easier prey or maybe just get drunk enough to forget all about me by morning. But if I couldn’t get away, I’d have to endure it. Plenty of the other maids in this household had had to do the same—I’d had to myself, a few years ago when Cesare Borgia had passed a disinterested eye over me and decided to bend me over a table.

But you wanted that
, the thought whispered. Cesare Borgia had been frightening, but he had at least been beautiful. Juan made my whole skin crawl across my flesh like it was trying to escape my body altogether.

It doesn’t matter
, I told myself. Juan Borgia had recognized me from the ball—Marco’s doing too, no doubt—and if the Pope’s favorite son wanted me, I’d have to grit my teeth through it. Grit my teeth and douse myself afterward with good strong vinegar.

“Did you fuck my brother?” he asked casually, taking another swallow of wine.

“W-what? Gonfalonier, I don’t—”

“Saw him looking at you too, at that ball. You prefer snakes to tigers?” He clapped a hand over his own codpiece. “I can tell you now, a tiger has the bigger cock.”

Sweet Santa Marta, maybe there was a way out of this unholy mess. “Cardinal Borgia has been gracious enough to honor me with his attentions,” I said meekly. “If that means you do not wish to have me—”

But my sliver of hope died, the hope that the Duke of Gandia would spurn his brother’s leavings, because Juan Borgia backhanded me across the face without any change in his expression at all.

“My brother’s attentions aren’t any kind of
honor
,” Juan spat as I watched a spray of blood fly from my nose across the cellar floor. “I’m the Holy Father’s favorite. I’m Gonfalonier of the papal armies. I defeated the French at Ostia!”

“Yes, Gonfalonier,” I mumbled around my own blood running down from my nose into my mouth.

“—and if I decide I want to poke your smelly kitchen cunt, you should be honored.
Honored.
”

My eyes hunted behind him for a weapon. More casks, more cups. A spiderweb. I couldn’t attack the Pope’s son, I
knew
that, I knew it—if I did, I’d be as dead as that guest at the masquerade who had ended up hanging from the loggia. But I wanted my favorite kitchen knife. I wanted it so badly I could feel the weight of the hilt in my hand, almost see the comforting gleam of the sharp edge. Because I didn’t think the Pope’s son would be satisfied with a poke and a fumble, not tonight. There was a strange glassy gleam in his eyes that wasn’t wine, and he padded toward me with a soft-footed prowl utterly unlike his usual posing swagger.

“I’ve never fucked a giraffe,” he remarked, and raised his arm to hit me again. I ducked his fist this time and ran for the doors again, so stupid because the guardsman stood in my way with folded arms, but I couldn’t stop myself from fleeing the Duke of Gandia in a raw surge of panic. I rebounded off the guard’s hard shoulder, and then I felt the Duke’s hand in my hair, jerking me back. I staggered into a branch of candles, knocking it flying. It tumbled into Juan Borgia, and I hoped it would set him on fire, but it didn’t; it just doused him in hot wax, and I heard him yell in surprise. A giggle of pure hysteria burst out of me to see the Duke of Gandia, the Gonfalonier of the papal forces, the Pope’s beloved son, covered in hot wax like a message case.

Stupid of me, so stupid of me to laugh.

“Bitch!” he howled, and when he began hitting me again I couldn’t duck this time. The guardsman came forward, stone-faced, holding me in place like a piece of furniture as Juan Borgia rained blows on my head and my ears rang like a kettle. “Down on the table,” I dimly heard him snarl, and I felt myself being lifted, slammed down on a hard surface.
Don’t fight
, I thought disjointedly,
don’t fight him
—my head cracked against the trestle boards, and I couldn’t help crying out. “Shut the bitch up,” Juan snarled. I could hardly focus my swimming eyes, but I could see him coming toward me with that terrifying prowl again, and everything in my blood shrieked warning. I didn’t even know I was moving until I got an arm free and lunged.

“You
scratched
me.” Juan sounded shocked, sincerely shocked, and I felt the strange hysterical urge to giggle again. If I hadn’t been bleeding from the nose and mouth by this time, leaking tears from the eyes, my ears ringing and my skin crawling with more raw wailing terror than I’d ever felt in my life.

“Bitch drew blood,” I heard the Duke of Gandia mutter, pettishly. “Hold her hand out. The one she scratched me with.”

The guard locked my body down this time, forcing out my left arm. I had a sudden flash of Cesare locking my body down on a table, spreading my arms just like this, but he had held me down to keep me from moving as he tasted my skin an inch at a time—

The vision disappeared in a flash of agony as Juan took the dagger from his belt and slammed it in one casual motion through my hand and into the wood below.

It hurt—sweet Santa Marta, but it hurt! Had Leonello hurt so badly when he lost his little finger to the French? If it had pained him half as much as this, he should have trumpeted my secrets all over Rome in revenge. My bloody lips parted, but I couldn’t make a sound. The quivering blade neatly bisected my palm, now slowly filling with blood.

“Good,” Juan panted. He cuffed blood off his cheek from where I’d scratched him, and I could see a bulge in his codpiece that wasn’t just fashionable padding. He was reeling drunk, but dear God, he was hard as a kitchen spit.
God help me,
I thought,
God help me, God help me
—but why would He bother? I’d been wedded to His Son, and I’d fled them both.

“Hold down her other hand,” Juan Borgia ordered. “Hold it down, and give me your knife.” The guard had no resistance from me this time as he spread my limp arm across the trestle table. But he hesitated as he took the knife from his belt and began to give it to his master, hesitated with a strange little grunt, and I opened my swimming eyes to see the puzzlement in his gaze as he looked down at the blade suddenly growing from his shoulder.

“Stop this at once,” said a cold voice from the cellar doors.

Bartolomeo
, I thought idiotically. But the figure in the doorway was far smaller, a dwarf with a knife in each hand who fixed the Duke of Gandia and his guardsman with an implacable gaze and said, “Let her go.”

Leonello

A
spill of yellow candlelight making jagged shadows over the stacks of wine casks. A girl’s long body arched and writhing across a table like an agonized female Christ. The knife through her hand, its hilt throwing a cruciform shadow in stark relief across the flagstones. The blood pooling in her palm, dripping slowly through her fingers to the floor as Juan Borgia bent over her other hand.

I saw it all in one horror-filled instant. What a thing to see, when all I wanted was a cup of wine and a little sleep.

I didn’t even know I’d thrown the knife until the guard staggered back, clapping a hand to the blade in his shoulder. Carmelina contracted into a trembling ball about her staked hand. And Juan Borgia just straightened in slow arrogance, darkness writhing in his eyes.

“Get out of here, dwarf,” the Pope’s son rasped.

The Pope’s son. So I’d been half right all along. I’d just had my eye on the wrong son. No wonder Cesare Borgia had seemed so entertained.

“You will take your thug, Gonfalonier,” I said. “And you will remove yourself at once.”

Juan’s voice scaled up. “How dare you!”

I felt the same floating emptiness I’d felt when I swept Giulia behind me and faced the French army with nothing but the blades in my hands. I had a blade in each hand now, though I couldn’t remember drawing either, and I pointed one straight at the Duke of Gandia.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Juan snarled, and started for me. I flicked my wrist, and Juan stopped as the blade winged through his hair, carving a thread-fine furrow along one temple. A hair’s width of blood welled up.
He’ll see you dead for that
, I thought, but I didn’t even remotely care. I whipped another knife out of my boot top and held it between two fingers.

“There are only two of you,” I said, quite conversationally. “And if you think I cannot kill you both with ease, you are sadly mistaken. I believe you have no weapon, Gonfalonier, since you were careless enough to leave it stabbed through that girl’s hand, and your guard is on the other side of that table. By the time he rounds it, you will be dead and I will have seven more blades to spare for him.”