The Lion and the Rose Read Online Free PDF

hook?”
    I hesitated, but I wanted him complacent, and feeding his curiosity seemed the best way to accomplish that. “Bribery,” I said shortly. “I paid a fisherman to pick me up in the night with his boat. Now drink.”
    Leonello chuckled, taking a long sniff of his mulled wine. “Smells cloying. Are you trying to sweeten me up?”
    “I assure you, it’s delicious. Wine, honey, cloves, a pinch of pepper—” I watched him take a sip. “And a dash of hemlock.”
    He froze, and I lunged. He was strong for a dwarf but the French had left him weak and blood-spent, and I slammed him flat to the pillows with my hand across his mouth. “Don’t swallow,” I said. “Just hold that wine in your mouth and listen.”
    His hazel eyes regarded me calmly over my hand.
    “You know what I am,” I said. “Mostly, anyway. I took the name Suora Serafina when I took my vows at the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice.
Serafina
,” I couldn’t help saying with a certain exasperation, “so you can stop all this Suora Carmelina business!” And I still couldn’t understand how he’d found out in the first place. Only my cousin Marco Santini knew where I’d fled from, and he was sworn to secrecy. To the rest of the household, I was just Marco’s orphaned cousin from Venice come to help in his kitchens now that she had no other place in the world. But somehow Leonello had put one fact with another, and then another—my hair, which had been chopped short when I first came to the household; my avoidance of churches and my knowledge of Latin prayers—who knows how many details he’d managed to sniff out? He was far too clever for his own good, or mine.
    “You think you can ruin me, by telling the world who I am?” I went on. “Well, you can. Even worse, because I won’t just be hauled back to my convent if I’m found. I’ll have my hands and my tongue chopped off for desecration, because I stole a reliquary from my convent to get money to travel south.”
    His eyes widened thoughtfully over my hand at that. God rot him, he had no right to look so cool, not when my whole inside was bubbling panic. I’d been nothing but a whirl of fear since he confronted me, just after the French attack. Throwing my secret in my face, just to make me cringe. Because according to him, his wounds were all my doing.
    “You’ve no cause to blame me,” I hissed. “I don’t care what you say, it was not my fault the French found us. It wasn’t my fault you had to go throwing yourself into some useless fight and nearly get killed, either. None of it was my fault, Leonello, and you’ve got no right to destroy me just because you want someone to blame—”
    I heard myself babbling and clamped my teeth on my tongue. For a second I could taste splinters, wood splinters and old blood—that would be the last thing I tasted, if an executioner ever drew my tongue out on the block to slice it off, with my hands to follow for the sin of robbing an altar.
Sweet Santa Marta save me.
Because Leonello was looking at me with no pity at all, no pity and no forgiveness either. I hadn’t known the French advance would be staking out the road we’d taken, but the only reason we’d taken that road at all was that I was desperate to avoid a fellow traveler in Capodimonte who had recognized me from my girlhood in Venice. I’d spun a web of lies to persuade Madonna Giulia to change course the next day, and we’d ridden straight into the French advance, and Leonello to his wounds and nearly his death.
    Not my fault
, I told myself. I’d robbed a convent and broken my vows as a nun; those sins I was entirely guilty of committing—but it was not my fault Leonello was wrapped in all these bloodied bandages.
    “So believe me,” I snarled, gulping down my fear, “I
know
you can ruin me, little man. You can see to it I lose my hands and my tongue, and I might as well be dead after that because a cook isn’t much good without hands and a tongue. But I can