Jo Walton

It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books

But he knows Florence needs him to keep the demons away. Surely that is why God has given him the power to see them and to banish them?

“You should have been a man,” he says, unpremeditatedly.

She turns and looks at him over her shoulder, not smiling at all now. “If I’d been a man I’d never have lost control of the city and it would be you coming to ask me for favours, Brother Girolamo.”

“God and the Holy Virgin will send Santa Caterina a hundred women, before I die, more than a hundred, because of you. In place of girls thrust into religion to be out of the way of their family, we will have women, grown women, coming of their own strong desire to be pure, to live as Wailers, to be closer to God.”

Girolamo turns the stone in his hand and looks down on its green smoothness. Hope hurts.

It is a long friendless way to Hungary.

She is wearing a dagger in a jewelled sheath. She has about her an air of danger. Then she wipes a crumb from her son’s cheek, and seems like any mother.

They are hung over the fire, and he falls, not forward on his face like good people, but on his back, like the damned.

This is Hell. All possible answers are wrong.

“Do you have the writings of Quintus Curtius?” he responds, and she writes back “I do. But you are the first person to offer them to me instead of telling me Alexander is no fit subject for a woman.” He has San Marco’s copy of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander copied for her.