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The man whose pocket they tried to pick has separated them and taken Giulia into his home, convincing her to become his apprentice instead of being sent to jail as he might have otherwise. But one evening they prey on the kindness of the wrong person, and both of their lives are irreversibly changed forever. Giuliana has disguised herself as a boy, calling herself Giuliano, and the two have worked out a system of picking pockets that usually works. She is with young Tommaso, and together the two have managed to survive to the best of their ability by thieving. Giuliana, who was raised in Florence’s Hospital of the Innocents, has been turned out onto the streets by the nuns. Accused of the Magician's murder, Giulia is pursued by the handsome policeman Niccolo, Lorenzo's henchmen, and foreign spies, and in order to survive, she must not only solve the mystery of the mystery of the Magician's murder, but that of her own past.It is November 1478, only seven months after the Pazzi conspiracy which took the life of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s brother, Giuliano, in a brutal attempt to gain control of the Florentine government. When Giulia's involvement with him ends with his murder, she's drawn into a treacherous web of espionage and deceit involving the forces of Rome, Naples, and a man known as Lorenzo the Magnificent. But the talismans are not what they seem, and neither is the Magician.

She accepts the job and begins smuggling his talismans throughout the city.

But his identity is secret-he is known only as the Magician of Florence-and he is in need of an assistant. The man claims to be a cabalist, a student of Jewish mysticism and ritual magic, who works for the most powerful families in Florence. Now, after spending two years as a successful pickpocket, an old man catches her about to make off with his purse, and rather than having her carted off to prison he offers her a business proposition. She chose neither, and after refusing an elderly suitor, Giulia escaped onto the streets of Florence. Raised in Florence's famous Ospedale degli Innocenti, her probing questions and insubordinate behavior made her an unwelcome presence, and at the age of fifteen, she was given an awful choice: become a nun, or be married off to a man she didn't love. In this irresistible historical novel set in the turbulent world of the Medicis, a young woman finds herself driven from pick-pocketing to espionage when she meets a mysterious man.