Free Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire

overseas.”
    â€œGo over land, through the Venetian marches, through Illyria, through Thessaly,” said Cesare. “I’ll secure you passage, funds, horses, and translators.”
    â€œHow am I to manage wrestling a relic from a horde of rabid monks?”
    â€œYou’ll make a most graceful thief.” Cesare began to yawn. “If not, you’ll make a clumsy conscript and find yourself positioned in the front rank. Now I’ve concluded my request. I’m turning to my bed.” He stood and left the room without thanks, without permission, without waiting to hear which of his offers would be accepted.
    Vicente turned to Lucrezia. “You asked me to hear him out, to pay some attention. And you reward me with this sentence of exile from my home? Who will protect my daughter?”
    â€œOh, that,” said Lucrezia Borgia. “Don’t worry about that. I shall look in on her from time to time. Montefiore is about halfway between Rome and Ferrara. You know I like to stop here. So I’ll take her under my wing. I’ll treat her as if she were my very own.”
    â€œLucrezia,” said Vicente. He had only one strategy. He stood and went to her and knelt before her. She was a woman of appetites and she had dallied with him by the thornbank. He held his hands out shoulder height, palms out, leaving himself defenseless, opening himself to her.
    She didn’t buckle. She said with the crispness of a prelate issuing a penance, “His mind is too full of fancy, Vicente. It was always like that. He is more devout and superstitious than your cook and yourcleric taken together. He won’t succeed in his military campaigns if he continues to moon on about this relic. He needs to discharge an agent to accomplish his goal so he can turn his attention to the truly pressing matters. You are the necessary distraction; now he can consolidate his campaign in the Romagna and build up the Borgias to be the kings of Italy.”
    Then she got up and walked away too, and Vicente was left alone, all alone, but for the dread about how his life was to change, and for the dwarf who sat hunched and more or less invisible in a shadowy corner of the piano nobile. The dwarf had tried to speak about recovering what had been lost, but Vicente’s attention had been diverted. Though the dwarf knew little about time, he was learning about timing, and he’d missed his chance. Not today. Maybe next day.

The three eyes of God

    A N HOUR before sunrise Fra Ludovico lighted the torches in the stable yard. He yawned, for he’d been awake all night, praying out of a nameless sense of dread. He wouldn’t put it beyond Cesare Borgia to conscript a priest if his numbers were low. And Fra Ludovico deplored visitors of stature anyway. They always expected to make their morning devotions before it was properly morning.
    In vestments that could have done with an airing he readied the roofless chapel at Montefiore for the celebration of the Eucharist. With a large flat leaf from a patch of marrows, he picked up the most obvious of the goat droppings. Then he dragged some benches onto the grass and, for the Duke, a prie-dieu.
    Cesare and two bodyguards appeared first. The Duc de Valentinois sank to his knees and groaned, in piety or excitement or to deliver himself of gas. At a dirty look from the priest the bodyguards left theirhalberds leaning against a pillar, just out of reach. “Even the doves in the barn rafters don’t wake up for morning Mass,” Fra Ludovico muttered. “Why should these assassins bother?”
    Because they need the grace the more, he knew. That was why.
    As he set out the implements for the sacrament, he studied the Borgia. A man in his pinkest health, halfway through his twenties or so, the priest guessed. The rugged appeal of a knight-at-arms. In his bed Cesare could have any guest he wanted, Fra Ludovico surmised; and rumor had it that he was generous in his