"How should you ever rule?" she challenged him, hating him the deeper the more intimately she faced him, the more their bodies grazed each other. She wore the bauta, white, anyone's mask. He wore a lion's mask, in gold and azure and sable, and plumes were its mane, a heraldic creature, snarling at the world.

"By blood," he said. "Here, and then Verona, I promise you. Have faith, Sforza, in your husband to be."

"You have not courted me," she said, a fading defiance.

"I need not. You're bought and paid for. Your grandmother will have her fine furnishings, and her garden. She cares for nothing else, believe me. We announce it tomorrow, and you have no appeal."

It was true. It was all too true. In all the world she had met only one kindly creature. Everyone else only pretended kindness, even her servants, because it was bought and paid for, and they had no choice.

"I want some chilled wine," she said, out of breath from dancing. Others dutifully applauded their duke, as they left the floor for the side of the room. "It's far too warm." He wrenched her hand to his lips. "Command me, dare you, to fetch your wine?"

"Shall I fetch it myself, and have every servant stare?"

"Shameless girl."

"Utterly," she said, protected behind her mask. "One who must be won. Like the city." She felt his body heat, greater than her own, and sensed she had just challenged a predator, a cruel and determined predator, and by so doing, had set the harsh conditions of the rest of her life.

Unless . . . she said to herself as he walked away and snapped his fingers at a servant, who brought her the wine. Unless, she thought, she could not be won at all.

"Three days," she heard as she sipped her wine. She stood near the group of the duke's men. "In three more days, at the Palazzo," but it was all part of the dizzy, overheated room, until, again, her wine finished, di Verona set her cup down and brought her up against him, face to face.

"What will happen three days from now?" she asked, challenging him.

"Where did your hear this three days?"

"Oh, I have ears, signore."

"In three days, in three days, the Doge's ball. And you will have an invitation," he said in a low voice. "I shall give it to you. And I shall escort you there. Do you understand me?" She understood too much, from far back, now that she understood things she had heard, having heard him and Nonna plotting together, when they regarded her as part of the furnishings. She stared into the lion's face, confronted its gleaming white grin inches from her face, and said, because she had not chosen to be meek: "Perhaps. Perhaps I shall."

"You will, fool woman. And you will appear with me tomorrow, in the grand processional, and in the square, where we shall announce our wedding. Remember your function. You are nothing necessary. An ornament. People love a wedding. A public betrothal. It will quite seduce them."

"Shall I? I might if you please me."

His hand wounded her arm. "Think of your grandmother. Think of her comforts, and of your own future. You can end, or you can begin."

She could not meet her harlequin. She would not bring him into so great a danger. This man would kill him, if she fled tonight to their trysting place, and tried to find him, tried to explain her failure of their rendezvous.

She had no choice but drink di Verona's wine and dance with him, in a room packed with foreigners, all foreigners, like herself, like Nonna. She danced until her feet hurt, and tried to think what she dared do. She found no answer.

And when the ball was done and the men were down to steady drinking, the ladies began to leave, and di Verona called his own gondoliers, and had her carried home to her own water-stairs, on the Raceta. It seemed dark, and ominous. The whole city felt in peril of the lightnings and the threats she had seen in that room.

And she only pretended to go inside. The moment the gondolas pulled away onto the Priuli, she slipped along the foundations, the merest precarious ledge above the rising flood, clinging here and there to the mooring-rings, perilously advancing crabwise, until she reached the broad walkway along the Priuli.

Then, weaving in and out among rain-spattered revelers cavorting along that frontage, she raced up and over the Ponte Vela, and on through the calles until she came to the Grand, and then down the Serpentine until she had reached the Ca d'Oro itself.

She hoped for lights to show from its windows. She hoped he would have been patient enough to go on waiting for her no matter how late the hour. But there was no hint of light to welcome her. She only had her key, which he had given her, and she found the waterside door, down a difficult and precarious ledge that soaked her feet.

Inside, she saw dimly, by the lightnings reflected off the water, the candle they had left, and a small pile of matches.

She lit that candle, and shut the door and climbed the stairs, up and up until the candlelight blazed out like a hundred stars in so many mirrors.

"Harlequin?" she asked the dark and the silence, but the echoes of her voice were distant and frightening, suggesting dark and deserted halls far beyond the reach of her candle. When she stopped moving, there was only silence.

Silence, to her ears, but for her eyes, a rose, left on the dusty sideboard—a red rose, a difficult and costly thing in Venezia, in its storm and its floods.

He had waited, but lost faith and left too early.

Still, he had left her a token of his presence.

She searched her possessions for what she might leave for him in turn, and settled on the most precious, the best thing she had: her ring, her mother's gift. She laid the small gold circlet on the marble tabletop. In the dust of abandonment she wrote, Your Giacinta, and laid the rose beneath. Then, exhausted, sick at heart and cold, she took her light and went back to the water-stairs, and retraced all the difficult way home.

The servants met her at the top of the inner stairs. She went up to her room, gave her clothing to the maids, and fell into bed, in the freedom of breath and residual ache of the ribs that came with unlacing.

She slept the night by fits and starts, and waked all tangled in the bedclothes at noon. Her hair was so tangled that her unhappy maid had to comb and comb it, painfully. Nonna came in, with the maid looking for her shoes, which turned out to have half-dried, badly soaked, and suffered from mud and scrapes. A great to-do erupted, when Nonna knew it. "How can you have come in with wet shoes?" Nonna asked. "Where have you been walking?"

"The gondola moved," she said, a lie. "While I was getting out. The gondolier was a fool. I nearly fell in. I'm sure the duke doesn't care."

"Never speak badly of him."

"I find nothing good," she said, disrespectfully.

"Hush. Take the shoes away. Dry them in the kitchen, Anna." This to the maid. And Nonna insisted she eat a biscuit and take sweet tea.

"You're nervous, of course, you're only nervous, my dear. It's the day, the very important day ahead of us. He'll come himself, in the barge, in just two hours, and you'll do us proud. So grand, so beautiful a bride you'll be."

There was no escape, no escape she could see. She sat and let herself be coiffed, and her feet stockinged in spotless silk and set in restored and fire-warmed shoes.

Then, with no choice but Nonna's before her, she let herself be laced into the amethyst silk gown, and hung her two masks, dangling from silk ribbons, among its folds.