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Cesare has been beside Lucrezia for as long as she can remember. Even in her earliest girlhood he was there, a smiling boy, his hand in hers, neither leading nor following but simply being.
There is no one in the world who loves Lucrezia more than Cesare. There is no one she could love more than him.
She asks her brother questions about how the world works, questions that her parents are not patient enough to answer. Besides, Lucrezia doesn’t trust Rodrigo or Vannozza nearly as much as she trusts her brother; his word is her law, and whatever he tells her she will believe.
She asks him where light comes from when she is five and he nine. They are walking through the streets of Rome, and she points at the bright sun and asks, “Where does it come from?”
“Ah,” Cesare says, “the sun was made by God, and He took the light from your hair to make it bright and beautiful.”
She giggles. “You’re lying.”
“I would never lie to you, Lucrezia.”
She reaches for his hand, clutches it tight.
“Swear you won’t, Cesare. Never.”
He stops in his path, and she stops too; he holds her shoulders and looks at her with all the intensity a nine-year-old can muster—which is quite a lot, actually, for him.
“I will never lie to you, Lucrezia,” Cesare says. “I swear it.”
When she is seven, she is deemed mature enough to attend a wedding. She spends the weeks before begging for any detail she can get, so that she will know what it will be like; her mother and father quickly become exasperated with her. Even the servants quickly adopt tired tones, sighing their answers, making it clear that they are bored of Lucrezia and her boundless curiosity. Cesare is the only person who entertains her for more than a week, and he never sounds bored, even when she asks him the same question each time.
The wedding is beautiful. She and Cesare sit together, and when she puts her hand in his he does not let go.
That night she asks him: “Will my wedding be so lovely as that?”
“Lovelier, sweet sister,” he promises her. “Your wedding will be a star so bright it makes what we witnessed today seem like a clump of dirt.”
She dreams that night of being blessed by a priest, of being the bride in a wedding of her own.
The groom is Cesare.
She does not tell him this.
They sit in the courtyard together, sprawled on the grass. Lucrezia is too young to care about getting dirt on her dress, and she twines her fingers amongst green stems, idly, as though she barely notices that the grass is even there.
“Will you make me a crown of flowers, Cesare?” she asks sweetly, looking up at her brother. “As befits a queen?”
“As befits an empress,” he tells her, and starts gathering flowers as she braids grass stems.
And the crown is indeed fit for an empress: Cesare takes the finest flowers from the garden (for which he is sternly reprimanded, later, by their mother) and twines them with Lucrezia’s little grass braids. He puts the crown he made on Lucrezia’s fair head, balancing the bright colors atop the blonde. She giggles and reaches up, stroking the soft fragile petals, though her eyes are fixed on his.
Cesare smiles at her, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes, and she knows that he means it completely when he says, “Someday you shall have a real one.”
“Empress Lucrezia,” she says. “It has a pretty sound.” She feels the flowers again, and grins at Cesare. “Will you be my emperor, then?”
He reaches out and takes one of her hands in both of his. “I will be whatever you want me to be.”
The words send a chill down her spine, bring coldness to the warm summer afternoon. She nods, though, and slides her hand out of his.
Lucrezia cups her brother’s face in her pale hands, brings her forehead against his, and whispers, “Then you will be my emperor, and you will build us a realm never seen before on the earth.”
“I swear.” His voice is hoarse.
She is twelve. He is sixteen.
She wakes at thirteen to pain in her belly and legs and blood on her sheets. When she screams, Cesare is the only one who comes running.
The moon is low overhead, sinking back toward the horizon; the stars are being chased away by the first pale colors of dawn. Lucrezia has not been awake this early in a long time, and she couldn’t say what woke her up, although she can make quite a good guess.
“Lucrezia—are you all right?”
Cesare is in her doorway, looking more worried than she’s ever seen him. The moon glints off something in his hand—
“Did you bring a knife?”
He looks down, but does not seem at all sheepish. “You screamed. I was worried.”
The blood is forgotten for a moment. She smirks at him, and beckons him into her room with a slight twitch of her fingers.
He sits down on the edge of the bed, running his fingers over the knife, but looking at her. She does not wonder whether he will cut himself—he won’t. Instead, she leans forward, so that her forehead rests on Cesare’s shoulder; he reaches up and strokes her hair like it’s the most precious thing in the world.
“What would you have done if there was someone in here?”
“Killed him.” The answer is flat, simple; Lucrezia wonders if she should perhaps be afraid, because she knows that Cesare means it.
“Lucky for you that there was no one here.”
“Lucky for them, you mean.”
“Them?” She looks up at him, expectant; his stare could bore holes through anyone else’s head, but for her it is the most tender way anyone could look at her.
“Everyone else.”
Lucrezia smiles then, and raises her head to kiss her brother on the cheek. “Is that a promise, then?”
“It always is, sweet sister.”
She is engaged at thirteen to Giovanni Sforza. The night before her wedding, she is startled by a knock on her door.
She’s been crying, so she yells out, “Leave me be!”
“It’s Cesare,” comes that familiar voice.
She sits up in her bed, not bothering to wipe at the tears on her face. “Come in.”
And he does. This time there is no knife in his hand, and he doesn’t take as long to come to her side. He wraps his arms around her; she buries her face in his shoulder, and because he does not remark on her tears, she starts crying again.
“If you don’t want to marry him, you don’t have to,” he tells her.
“Of course I have to. I don’t have a choice. And anyway, he may turn out to be—“ She sniffles. “A good man.”
“And if he is not?”
She does not answer, simply looks at him, with tears running down her face and blotchy skin. His jaw clenches, just a little, but it’s enough.
“If he proves ungallant,” Cesare says, and Lucrezia smiles, “I shall cut his heart out with a knife.”
She kisses him then, without thinking about it, and he kisses her back, rough and hard and desperate; this is their last night together, before they are both caught in chains by marriages, and she would do anything to clutch at the past and grasp it to her for a little longer.
One hand slides up the inside of her thigh, and the other to her breast, and she curls her fingers around the base of his neck and brings her mouth to his throat. His breath catches, and so does hers, as his fingers get higher; it stops there, though, for she must prove a virgin on her wedding day.
She lets out a sigh of frustration, and he bends his neck so that his mouth brushes against her forehead.
“I wish I could marry you, Cesare,” she whispers against his skin, against the blood beneath. “I dreamed of it once—when you promised me a beautiful wedding—“
“You will have one, sister,” he says. “But it will not be to me.”
She kisses him again then, on the mouth, and there are no words exchanged for the rest of the night. None need be.
Cesare does not cut out Giovanni Sforza’s heart with a knife, though if he had witnessed the scenes of her marriage he surely would have done so.
Lucrezia wishes more than anything that he had.