Reign of Madness by Lynn Cullen

dropped to his knees before me. “I am happy that Your Highness is live today.”
    I smiled with surprise. “Thank you. You speak well now, señor.”
    Juanito looked up. “Yes. I have good teacher.”
    I hazarded a glance at don Diego. “You taught him?”
    “It came to my attention, once, that he might learn.”
    Our gazes met. His narrow face had grown more angular, his expression more grave, his gray-green gaze more searching. He was, I admitted to myself, unnervingly handsome.
    Hostias, I was turning into María.
    Juanito sprang to his feet. “He show me to ride, My Lady. Horses.”
    “Did he?” I said.
    Diego gave a small shrug.
    Juanito reached out to Estrella, who drummed me with her tail. “I ride mules, ponies, anything,” he said. “You should see.”
    “I’d like to,” I said warmly. “Very much.”
    “Her Highness must be occupied now,” said Diego. He touched Juanito’s arm. “We should go.”
    “Don Diego,” I said.
    He paused.
    “Thank you for saving me.”
    “I was glad to.” He turned to leave.
    I did not wish him to go. “I hear my mother has given you a length of golden cloth. I am sorry the reward was not greater.”
    He halted. The offended look on his face took me by surprise. “That is not why I did it,” he said coldly.
    “I did not mean—”
    “I am sorry to have given you the impression that my care was for the reward.”
    “That was not my impression!” He had said once that he dreamed of being rich, but I did not think of that. “I was only thanking you.”
    “In fact, I tried to give back the cloth, but your brother said that your mother would be insulted. I only wished to help you—my reward was in seeing you safe.”
    “He give me the cloth,” said Juanito. “I make good cloak of it.”
    “There you are!” Plump and pretty doña Magdalena, one of my sister Isabel’s ladies, swept toward us. The tops of her breasts, pressed by her bodice, swelled nearly to her chin. I saw how Juan’s boys kept her in the corner of their sights when they paraded before her in their armor. My little love for her grew littler when she exclaimed, “Are you not going to dance with me?”
    Of course someone else had designs on Diego Colón. Even on the edge of Juan’s crowd, his brooding handsomeness would not be overlooked.
    Doña Magdalena latched on to Juanito’s arm and stroked it as if it were a puppy. “Do you remember the steps that I taught you?”
    “Si, señorita.” Sheepishly, Juanito let himself be led to the dance by my sister’s lady. I found myself standing with Diego.
    In strained silence, we watched Juanito anxiously hunch forward as he waited on the first beat, then bend his knees on the second beat, and with lips pressed together in concentration, rise on his toes on the third. He launched into a serviceable saltarello.
    I could bear the silence no longer. “So Juanito dances.”
    “Yes.”
    “It was good of you to teach him. I suppose you’ve had no lack of partners at the feasts my brother gives. I daresay he has feasts nearly every night.”
    He glanced at me as if trying to decipher the meaning of my words. “She taught him.”
    “Doña Magdalena?”
    He nodded.
    “Oh, so you see much of Isabel’s ladies?”
    He drew in a breath, then let it out slowly. “I have heard from my father. He has sent back a fleet with Antonio de Torres. Don Antonio will report to your parents as soon as he has an audience.”
    My heart sank. He could not deny he was romancing one of my sister’s ladies.
    “Father writes to me that he has sent back thirty thousand ducats’ worth of gold, just a little taste of what is coming. The rivers there are full of it.”
    “That is good,” I murmured, crestfallen. Would he not ask me to dance?
    He frowned at me before continuing. “What I wished to say was that he wrote that he still plans, at my request, to return to a certain land where he came across the tracks of lions and griffins, a wondrous place where there