The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini (25 page)

She was lonely, scared and needed to talk to someone. The old patriarch would have done. Unfortunately, Theodore was dead and so was Aunt Alexa, and Marco was mad again, and Tycho wasn’t here and Frederick was a traitor.

“Go,” she shouted.

“Listen to me,” Frederick begged.

“So you can tell me more lies? I bet all those things you said about Annemarie weren’t true either.”

She’d never seen anyone go white with anger before. Frederick bowed again, and this time he meant it. She watched him walk backwards to the door. Since he was a prince in his own right this was unnecessary and she wondered if it was mockery, but his pale blue eyes showed only cold fury.

“I never even liked you,” Giulietta said.

He bit his lip. “You did,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

Frederick shut the door carefully and she heard his footsteps in the corridor. They stopped when she opened the door and slammed it hard behind him. The loud silence that followed was broken by the sound of his heels on the stairs and, later still, a jangle of harness in the
piazzetta
.

She should call the Council.

Only then she’d have to admit to telling Frederick secrets and they trusted her little enough as it was. Her aunt they had mistrusted because she was Mongol, Giulietta they mistrusted because she was young. At least, they whispered that that was their reason. Their real reason was simpler. She was a woman in command of a council filled with old men.

If she told them Frederick had tricked her into friendship, they’d remove her and replace her with Alonzo, who was a man, obviously. A famous general, which was even better. And he was probably going to win anyway. The Byzantine emperor had acknowledged Alonzo as rightful duke of Venice. That was what Frederick had arrived to tell her. But she’d been too furious to listen. He didn’t even deny it.

His father had sent him.

Sigismund had ordered Frederick to make friends. Every word he’d said to her was false. She couldn’t trust him any more than she’d been able to trust Tycho. Ca’ Ducale was freezing, its tapestries stiff with cold, the marble tiles of its open colonnades glazed with frost. Individual rooms were warm but ice had entered its fabric and its soul. She and the palace suited each other.

Three thrones waited, with one larger than the others.

Alexa was dead, and Alonzo banished and Marco confined to his room on her orders for murdering a councillor in cold blood; for all the city had been told Bribanzo died in a street stabbing. Half that city thought she had no right to be Regent anyway. What if Uncle Alonzo simply decided to return? Would the palace guard obey her if she ordered them to defend her? Would the militia bands flock to her banner or line up along the Riva degli Schiavoni to cheer Alonzo’s barge as it drew alongside?

Slouched in Marco’s seat, Giulietta stared at the shields on the panelled walls and wondered how different life would have been if she were a boy. Or if she’d been someone else entirely. Someone other than a Millioni. Marco the Just had sat where she sat. The thought of Aunt Alexa’s husband made her sit straighter.

Il Millioni himself had sat here the day he claimed the throne and abolished five centuries of elected rule. She’d wanted to return to the Republic and that would never happen now. She’d wanted many things, from a happy childhood to marriage to Tycho, and the first hadn’t happened and the second never would . . . Tycho had betrayed her, too. His love was ambition.

It was the only reason for what he’d done. He’d been the first to worm his way into her heart; made her want him and offered to protect her and become a father to Leo. And then what happened? He left when she begged him to stay, offering his loyalty to the man who . . . She couldn’t even bear to finish that thought.

Even worse than this he had returned to kill Aunt Alexa. And now Frederick – who was meant to be her friend – had not only tricked her into friendship, but also destroyed what little hope she had left. Lord Bribanzo had died with two scrolls in his belt. One said Frederick was here on the orders of his father. The other that Maria Dolphini had given birth to a child. Alonzo had a son, an heir to take his name and follow after him. Bribanzo was to challenge Giulietta on whether she believed the child was Alonzo’s . . .

Of course it was. He’d stolen Leo and was passing him off as Maria’s child. The second part of Alonzo’s challenge was more brutal still. He stated his belief that the boy in the nursery upstairs, where she could hardly bear to go, was an impostor, which he was. And that a dead infant answering Leo’s description was hidden in the crypt of the basilica, which it was. He challenged her, on oath, to say that he lied.

Her uncle had won.

When the Council heard the news they would replace her and Alonzo would sail home with Tycho at his side. Frederick would abandon her. Not that he’d ever really loved her. She’d be back to who she always was. Someone’s cousin, someone’s niece, someone’s plaything. A thought so horrific occurred to her that she nearly pissed herself. What if Alonzo had promised her to Tycho? What if she got the marriage she’d once wanted to a man who betrayed her at the command of a man who’d done worse? She would never forgive what her uncle had done the night an abbess and a hedge witch held her down so Dr Crow could impregnate her on his orders.

She loved Leo, but the nature of his getting tortured her.

Walking to the door, Lady Giulietta shouted for a messenger and sent him for the new master of the Assassini, an anonymous man who’d returned a month earlier from Vienna to find his city changed. He was master because Giulietta had stripped Tycho of that title. She waited impatiently for his arrival.

“My lady?”

“Find a hedge witch called Mistress Scarlet and the Abbess of San Loyola, kill them both before nightfall, bring me proof . . .”

He risked a glance and bowed.

The door shut behind him with a whisper and it was done. She’d condemned two people to death. Lady Giulietta would have made it three but doubted he’d obey. Asking the master of the Assassini to add her to his list might be an order too far.

Aunt Alexa’s poisons chest sat beside Giulietta’s desk, as it had sat beside that desk from the time Alexa first arrived in the city as a child and asked for a room of her own. No servant had dared move it or even dust it. A thin film covered its surface, except for two patches where Giulietta had taken to using it as a footstool.

The saddest thing about the study for Giulietta was not that Aunt Alexa had died here, it was her aunt’s dead pots of flowers and withered bushes. Alexa grew them to provide fruit for her giant bat, Nero, which would eat nothing else, coming from Egypt where that was what bats ate. After Nero died, Alexa kept the plants alive anyway, having braziers brought in day and night to keep them warm when the snows came. With her death the braziers stopped being brought and the plants died. There was probably a lesson in that somewhere.

Pulling back her scissor chair, Giulietta sat at her desk, found a sheet of velum and a quill and reached for the ink with shaking hands. When she discovered the ink was dry she gave up all thought of writing a note. What would she have said anyway?

The bottle was one of the smallest.
Dracul’s tears
read its label.

A crude glass vial with a cork stopper sealed with wax. Her aunt had medicines arranged by potency and it had taken Giulietta a while to work out the meaning of the coloured waxes sealing her poisons. Red meant death. Only this bottle was in the next row. Its wax was purple. Breaking the seal, Giulietta hesitated.

Self-murder was a sin. She would ask God to take account of what had been done to her already when he decided what should be done to her in the afterlife for what she was about to do.

Lady Giulietta crossed herself.

She said the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed and Ave Maria, because those were the prayers she knew by heart without even having to think about them. After the last
Amen
came the poison.

You’re giving me the child?

That was the last thing Tycho intended.

At the thought, the foul breeze through the cave laughed. It was sour and old and carried putrid memories of someone he wasn’t. The black flames and cavernous ceilings of the memory were not his. Tycho managed five paces into the cave before the stink forced him to a stop. The cave walls were soft, spongy and warm to the touch. As narrow inside as the entrance suggested without.

Leo was crying, pitiful whoops as he struggled for air. Tycho wished he knew how to help the child. But his own head was filled with dreams of a mother who died so he could be born. Impossible dreams. She was beautiful, distant and cold, with the same amber-flecked eyes. She walked in daylight and Tycho wondered why, if that was true, he now lived in darkness. Except why should dreams be true? “Sleep,” the voice said. “Or whatever it is you do.”

“The child . . .”

“Will not die while it is here.”

He woke to putrid warmth on a bed of white fibrous rot like albino body hair. A tendril of tree root had wrapped itself round his ankle and proved harder than he expected to snap. Leo lay beside him, eyes closed and curled into a shivering ball. The voice had told the truth. The child was alive, although only just. Picking him up, Tycho staggered to the entrance.

“What do you think?” Tycho asked.

Apparently the infant thought nothing. At least, nothing worth more than a snuffle. The day was dying and the coming night his only chance of ending this. Fear of the cave, or the need to search the fort thoroughly, meant Roderigo’s men had yet to force the yard door. On one side of the valley beyond the fort the sides were black, on the other they were purple, and he saw the lines where they joined the sky with frightening clarity.

“Planet,” Tycho said. “Planet, star, asteroid . . .”

The child showed little interest in his astronomy lesson. Above the cave’s mouth the sky glittered with the objects Tycho offered the boy, while the moon cast a tallow glow across what showed of the giant crossbow, which stood undisturbed. Tycho imagined that meant the rock he’d jammed beneath the doors was still there. If there was a guard on the battlements he was sleeping, bad at his job or simply too afraid to do it properly.

“Remember how the wild archers hesitated in front of the fort?”

Leo didn’t but Tycho did. Only Lord Roderigo’s fury had driven them on. They were already afraid. Brave men, naturally brave men, made weak by what they feared.
What you love makes you weaker . . .
Tycho wiped away the thought and wished it would stay banished. Maybe they were right to be afraid. Maybe he should be more afraid than he was. From inside came the noise of men talking. Tycho listened harder. Hearing the jangle of bridles on the far side of the fort.

“Leaving or arriving?” Tycho asked.

Leo kept his answer to himself. But Tycho thought it must be someone leaving, a message for Alonzo perhaps saying his quarry had gone to ground.

“Do you want to be part of what happens next . . . No? Probably wise. Princes shouldn’t be involved in things like this. Better put you back in the cave then.”

The jangle of harness receded and Tycho let the fort settle before striding to the rear door and hammering hard as if demanding entry. As if he was not the man who’d barred the door. Inside the talking stopped. A moment’s utter silence gave Tycho his own ragged heartbeat.

The fools should have rushed to the murder holes in the tunnel roof above and dropped stones or fired arrows through its rusting grating. Instead they erupted into shouts of outrage. So Tycho hammered again, louder and harder, furiously insistent. He could sense men gathering on the far side of the door. Bows being strung and arrows slotted to their strings. Maybe they expected him to open the door.

In case any dawdled, Tycho hammered one final time before retreating to yank the porcupine’s lever. Three strings released with a twang, the giant bow straightened and thirty-six steel-tipped arrows, matched exactly to the steel holes in the door that would have let them fire out, hissed inwards.

Screaming began.

So much blood . . .
The thought followed him up the fortress wall and along the top. The single sentry listening to the screaming below never heard his death coming. Tycho broke his neck with a single twist and fed briefly.

A tiny life made of rapes and murder. Tents, ragged ponies, hours in the saddle. Years in the wrong country, speaking someone else’s language and vowing devotion to lords to whom he owed no loyalty.
Tycho tossed him over the edge, hearing his body thud to cold dirt below.

He was at the bottom of the guard steps before any realised. The distance between battlements and hall closed in a second. He stood on the edge of
turning
, his reflexes razor and his nerves tight. The nearest archer opened his mouth to raise the alarm and died. Tycho killed fast, but the wild-haired man beyond had time to yell before Tycho broke his neck. Around him, men drew swords or slotted arrows on to their strings. “Kill him,” Roderigo shouted.

Now there was a refrain Tycho had heard before. He grinned, and was still grinning when an arrow hit his shoulder and ripped straight through. Looking up showed Tycho archers on a balcony above. As if they’d been waiting for his attention, the rest released their arrows. Half missed, the other half spiked him like a saint in one of Marco’s paintings. The archers lowered their bows, waiting for Tycho to drop as the room wavered around him and blackness edged his sight.

To their disbelief Tycho refused to fall.

Instead he flowed up the wall, spiny with arrows, rolled himself with difficulty over the balcony’s edge and dropped as half a dozen archers fired. Rising fast, he ripped two arrows from his chest and returned them to their owners. The world slowing as he spun, jabbing and slashing with steel-tipped arrows until blood sprayed, the air grew drunk on red mist and he no longer had arrows in his body.

“Kill him,” Roderigo screamed.

“You kill me,” Tycho shouted. “Unless you’re too scared?”