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“You’re frowning again,” Lucrezia said.
He could feel her breath against his face, a whiff of lively movement in the stolid air of the Papal Palaces, tangling his hair and stirring his lashes. She shared his bed that evening, laying across the spacious pillow from him, studying him carefully as she might a painting or a particularly well-embroidered shawl. He watched her lips fall into a slight purse -- a calculated moue of displeasure that he had not seen on her face as a child. Even after the farce of her marriage to the Sforza, Lucrezia had still been innocent in many ways when she had wed Alfonso d’Aragon, but she had returned from Naples with knowledge about many subjects that Cesare would never have wished her education to include. Among her skills was this very pout -- a careful, politic expression of feminine disapproval weighed to be just strong enough to influence but never to offend. Cesare loathed it.
“So serious.” Her finger traced a path up his nose and between his eyebrows, pressing upwards to smooth away his frown. “What are you thinking of, to look so thunderous?”
“Not thunderous,” he denied automatically. “My mind was only drifting, I am not angry.” Outside, the bells tolled the evening prayers, then fell silent again. A waft of incense slipped through the open windows, heavy in the still air.
“Drifting to?”
“Pesaro, if you must know,” he confessed. “Now that Forli has fallen and Caterina been consigned to the Castel Sant’Angelo, we must move on the other Sforza properties. The French army should be at its gates in a few days. I may have to oversee the siege.”
“Pesaro,” she echoed with wry humor, glaring at him for a heartbeat, then shifting to flop ungracefully onto her back and cross her arms beneath her breasts. The motion pushed the sheets down to her waist, emphasizing the planes and valleys of her perfect skin, creamy and blush in the red light of the dying sun. Her long hair fell around them both like cloth of gold. They’d already had each other once that afternoon, but the sight of her stirred him as always. “You lie abed with me and think of your army.” Her merry eyes belied her sharp words when she looked back over at his face. “I am cursed to love men who rise at the thought of siege towers.”
Cesare hummed wolfish and low in his throat, then shifted closer to press himself against her side. “Siege towers. And cannons.” He pinched at her nipples. “And pikemen.” He drew the word out lustily, as another man might have said bosoms or thighs, and she rewarded him by giggling helplessly and batting at his chest.
“Footsoldiers smell all over like boots left three weeks in the rain, you simply cannot be aroused by them.” Her stomach quivered when she laughed, and Cesare thought it a sensation against his hard cock that he would like to have repeated often.
“So aroused,” he contradicted. “I am utterly helpless in the face of pikes. I shall never --” and his voice quieted as he broke off, looking up, distracted by a noise in the corridor outside. Raised voices echoed down the stone hallway from the guards at the other end, though he could not make out the words, and what sounded like scuffling lasted only a few seconds then ended abruptly. Cesare rolled twice to get across the vast expanse of the bed and gain his feet.
His sword lay beside his belt near the desk, a few steps away. He unsheathed it and held it at his side, feeling foolishly naked and utterly unprepared. His heart beat a frantic tune within his chest. He’d locked no doors and taken no precautions here, for the gonfalonieri’s rooms within the Vatican should have been impregnable. Lucrezia gathered the sheet back over her upper body and clutched it to her neck. Even under threat of danger he could not bring himself to ignore the entrancing curve of her breasts before she covered herself. In truth the sheet would do her no good; anyone bursting in on them now could have little doubt that their relationship far exceeded the bounds of sibling propriety.
Footsteps in the corridor drew nearer, the door creaked. Cesare raised his sword and felt his nerves sing like bowstrings taut to breaking, ready at a breath to run the intruder through. The door began to open and a thought sprang to mind -- it could be the Holy Father himself outside. Almost impossible, certainly unlikely, but perhaps...
That thought briefly stayed his hand and a single moment’s hesitation was all it took. His sword thrust landed awry, glancing off of traveler’s leathers and skating aside to bury deep and quavering in the doorframe instead of impaling the man who’d stepped through.
“Micheletto?” Lucrezia asked, surprised but not alarmed. The intruder’s hand closed on Cesare’s wrist, wrenching his hand free of the sword with professional efficiency.
“Your blade grows rusty, my lord.” Between the screeching nerves of the moment before and the relief of hearing Micheletto’s familiar, beloved, safe voice, Cesare’s head spun and he gasped for breath.
“Micheletto?” It was the man himself, standing there solid as ever in well-used riding leathers and the black velvet cloak that Cesare had gifted him, what felt like lifetimes ago. His hair was longer than he’d kept it before, and the smell of the outdoors followed him into the room as though he’d spent most of the day ahorse. “I could have killed you.”
“Not like that you’d not have, my lord.” The words rankled briefly at Cesare’s ego, but Micheletto was only ever dryly insubordinate when he was also right. Cesare let it go without comment, instead closing the door again behind them and this time, belatedly, barring it.
“What are you doing here? Is something wrong in Forli?” Cesare moved to the bed and sat down next to Lucrezia, who had fashioned the sheet into a loose drape for herself and was sitting up. Micheletto watched them both without judgment, eyes taking in the unmistakable evidence of their entanglement and face placid as ever. “The last time I saw you, you said you were talking to God.”
“And He did not answer,” Micheletto said. “But the Holy Father did send me this.” From beneath his cloak he drew a courier’s tube of leather covered in oilcloth and opening it, produced a message.
“You cannot read,” Cesare said pointedly, as Lucrezia grasped the missive and scanned the words.
“I paid for a scribe to read it to me, my lord. The Holy Father said that you had been crippled, since your right hand had cast itself away.” Micheletto’s own hands fisted briefly in the hem of his cloak, then relaxed again. Cesare watched the knots of his knuckles, hardened from years of daily bladework and constant practice with his cheesecutter. “But I see now that you have both your hands, my lord.”
Cesare simply stared at him, waiting. Micheletto was unlettered, never stupid.
“When I left, I prayed that God would speak to me, my lord,” Micheletto said at last, after a pause of some moments. “He sent me no burning bush and no still, small voice carried on the wind, but mayhaps He did send me a letter from the Pope, and His Holiness begged me to return to my master. In truth, my spirit desired it already and now the only evidence that I have of God is that perhaps He desires it of me as well.”
It was easily the longest speech he’d ever heard Micheletto give, and Cesare turned it over in his mind. Micheletto had seen enough of the underbelly of the Vatican to know how few orders of the Pope had anything whatsoever to do with God. But here Micheletto stood, before him again, his face clear and seeming more at peace than Cesare had seen since they had first confronted Savonarola and his flames in Florence. Perhaps, if Micheletto had not found God’s voice, he had at least achieved some measure of peace within himself. If Cesare could get the man to stick around long enough, he resolved to question him on the matter eventually, but for now he could let it pass.
“I confess, I would be glad to have you beside me again,” Cesare said, standing and extending a hand. When Micheletto took it, Cesare drew him closer into an embrace, realizing belatedly that he was still naked and could feel the cold buckles and studs of Micheletto’s riding clothes against the whole of his bare skin. Micheletto seemed to struggle for a moment with the question of where to place his hands, then gave in and relaxed in full, leaning against Cesare as if certain that he would find support. Cesare squeezed at his shoulder blades, then ran a hand up and tangled his fingers in the reddish curls at the base of Micheletto’s neck. Micheletto sighed, and after a pause rough fingers drifted up the line of Cesare’s spine, lightly enough to draw gooseflesh like a blanket across his shoulders. Despite the oddity of their embrace, Cesare realized that his father had been right. It felt like a dislocated limb slipping back into joint after long injury, relieving a stress and pressure Cesare hadn’t even known he was carrying until it was abruptly gone.
“Well,” said Lucrezia as they drew apart, satisfaction in her tone.
“I should go and find rooms, my lord.”
“Nonsense. You should sit down,” said Lucrezia, and they both turned to her, side by side, one naked and the other clothed, but with mirrored expressions of astonishment. “Oh come, Cesare.” She patted the bed beside herself and he obediently crawled up to settle at the head of the bed by her side. The sheet slipped down again, baring her to the waist, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Go on, take your boots off and sit down there.” She indicated a place towards the foot of the bed, between Cesare and herself, placing Micheletto at the point of a triangle formed by the three of them. “You might as well go ahead and settle in, he was talking about besieging Pesaro even before you came. Clearly the two of you have urgent affairs to discuss.”
“But --”
“But?” This was her imperial voice, meant to remind the listener that she was Lucrezia Borgia and her will was not so much a suggestion as The Way The World Would Be, so the world had best rearrange itself accordingly.
“But I’ve been riding all day, my lady. I’m filthy, and your bed --”
“I have bedded stableboys, as well you know. In the hay, no less. You’ll hardly be the dirtiest thing to grace a bed of mine. Sit,” she repeated, stubborn to the soul. She tossed her lovely head, and her hair rearranged itself behind her like a cloak begowning a queen. Cesare shrugged in the face of her decisiveness, and Micheletto seemed to accept this as some sort of permission, for he perched on the edge of the bed and began the process of unlacing his boots.
“Pesaro, my lord?” he said, and removed a pair of daggers from sheaths hidden inside the boots, laying them out on the duvet beside himself. Lucrezia lifted one and idly fingered its edge, playing it back and forth and watching the candle gleam reflected on its steel.
“Yes,” said Cesare, observing them both and feeling unaccountably at ease with himself, sitting here with his sister naked beside him and Micheletto now cross-legged between them at their feet. The sun had set, bringing nighttime’s relief from the fetid heat of the air. The added curtains of darkness fell down about the bed like heaviest damask, broken only by the candlelight, and when Lucrezia interrupted their strategy session to ask whether Micheletto had any other knives she might play with, Cesare spared a moment to marvel at the unlikeliness of it all.
Here, in spite of all odds, were the two people he cared for most, both in their own ways exposed and yet -- miracle of all -- comfortable with themselves and each other. He took Lucrezia’s hand and smiled at her, then turned back to where Micheletto was beginning to sketch out a battle campaign by sculpting lumps in the topography of their duvet, and felt himself at peace.