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made him Cardinal of Valencia when he was only seventeen years old! But as we all know, he resigned from that post—the first cardinal in the Church’s history to do so! The Borgia treat our country and the Vatican as if they were their own private fiefdom! Cesare’s plan now is to crush the North first, to subdue the Romagna and isolate Venice. He also intends to extirpate and destroy all of us remaining Assassins, since he knows that in the end we are the only people who can stop him.
Aut Caesar, aut nihil
—that’s his motto—’Either you’re with me or you’re dead.’ And do you know, I think the madman actually believes it.”
    “My uncle mentioned a sister,” Ezio began.
    Machiavelli turned to him. “Yes. Lucrezia. She and Cesare are…how shall I say? Very close. They are a very close-knit family; when they are not killing those other brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, whom they find inconvenient to them, they are…coupling with each other.”
    Maria Auditore could not suppress a cry of disgust.
    “We must approach them with all the caution we would use to approach a nest of vipers,” Machiavelli concluded. “And God knows where and how soon they will next strike.” He paused and drank half a glass of wine. “And now, Mario, I leave you. Ezio, we will soon meet again, I trust.”
    “You’re leaving this evening?”
    “Time is of the essence, good Mario. I ride for Rome tonight. Farewell!”
    The room was silent after Machiavelli left. After a long pause, Ezio said bitterly, “He blames me for not killing Rodrigo when I had the chance.” He looked around at them. “You all do!”
    “Any of us might have made the decision you made,” said his mother. “You were sure he was dying.”
    Mario came and put an arm around his shoulders. “Machiavelli knows your value—we all do. And even with the Pope out of the way, we’d still have had to deal with his brood—”
    “But if I had cut off the head, could the body have survived?”
    “We must deal with the situation as it is, good Ezio, not with it as it might have been.” Mario clapped him on the back. “And now, as we are in for a busy day tomorrow, I suggest we dine and then prepare for an early night!”
    Caterina’s eyes met Ezio’s. Did he imagine it, or was there a flicker of the old lust there? He shrugged inwardly. Perhaps he’d just imagined it.

SEVEN
     

    Ezio ate lightly—just
pollo ripieno
with roasted vegetables; and he drank his Chianti cut half-and-half with water. There was little conversation at dinner, and he answered his mother’s string of questions politely but laconically. After all the tension that had mounted in anticipation of the meeting, and which had now melted away, he was very tired. He had barely had a chance to rest since leaving Rome, and it looked now as if it would be a long time still before he could realize a long-cherished ambition of spending some time back in his old home in Florence, reading and walking in the surrounding gentle hills.
    As soon as he decently could, he made his excuses to the company and set off for his bedroom, a large, quiet, dimly lit space on one of the upper floors, with a view across the countryside rather than the town. Once he’d reached it and dismissed the servant, he let go of the steeliness that had supported him throughout the day, and his very body slumped, his shoulders sagged, and his walk eased. His movements were slow and deliberate. He moved across the room to where the servant had already drawn him a bath. He approached it, tugging at his boots and taking off his clothes as he did so, and, naked, stood for a moment, his clothes bundled in his hands, before a full-length mirror on a stand near the copper tub. He looked at his reflection with weary eyes. Where had the four long decades gone? He straightened. He was older, stronger even, certainly wiser; but he could not deny the profound fatigue he felt.
    He threw his clothes onto the bed. Under it, in