The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

26





Lady Giulietta knew she should have put a wrap over her nightgown, but it was more than this that made the guards refuse to meet her eyes. Faces tight, they looked as if they wanted to hurry past. “I said, what’s happened?”

“Giulietta.”

The voice came from behind. Her name without hesitation or stutter. Turning, she saw Marco flanked by guards with torches. His face was pale and his gaze serious. It took her a moment to realise he was dressed.

“You couldn’t sleep?”

“It’s almost as if she knew,” he said.

Who knew? Knew what? Giulietta’s fingers tightened into fists as her cousin turned for a window to stare at snowflakes falling from a grey, dark sky. On either side of him, guards came to a standstill. “But how could she know?” Answering, “This was my mother. How could she not know?”

“Marco . . . What’s happened?”

Then she knew because a slight body was carried from Alexa’s study on a bier. Although a blanket covered it, blood had soaked through grey wool to leave a crimson stain where her heart would be. “Don’t . . .” Marco shouted. His words came too late to stop Giulietta from lifting the blanket away.

So beautiful . . . Aunt Alexa looked asleep.

Lady Giulietta couldn’t help dragging the blanket down to reveal her aunt’s wound. And though Marco came to stand beside her, he let her touch her finger to the blood-soaked tear in Alexa’s gown. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Me too.” Marco’s arm went round her, and she leant her head into his shoulder. “Now, let them d-do their job . . .” He moved her back and one of his guards replaced the blanket before the bier was carried away. “I’ve told them to t-take her to the crypt.” Marco’s eyes were unreadable. “Many more b-bodies and we’ll have to stack them somewhere else.”

Shock. This has to be the shock talking. “Who did this?”

“That can wait. First I must s-secure the city.” Gesturing to Captain Weimer, he called the man closer. “Wake the Ten, tell them they’re n-needed now. Accept no excuses, everyone is to attend.”

The captain was surprised at Marco’s crispness. This was not the duke he or his officers knew. This duke was already glaring beyond him to palace guards crowding the stairs as they fought to present themselves.

“Weimer.”

He seemed shocked Marco knew his name.

“Throw a c-cordon round Ca’ Ducale. Put archers on the roof and wrap them warm, they’re no used to me half d-dead from cold. Have a fire lit in the s-smaller state room, if anyone comes from the embassies p-put them there. Have them g-given wine and f-food, water and food for the Mamluks and Moors. Send a m-messenger to let me know.”

“Yes, highness.”

The duke headed for the stairs down which his mother’s body had just vanished and his bodyguard hurried after. “If shock can make fools of men,” Lady Giulietta said to Captain Weimer, who stared after them.

“It can make men of . . .” He didn’t dare finish his sentence.

“He was brilliant as a child, my aunt said.”

Captain Weimer nodded, and Giulietta left him pondering as she hurried after Marco, who was in a corridor below ordering braziers be lit in the council room and letters sent to other princes informing them his mother was dead. She wondered how Marco expected the letters to be carried in his weather and realised he regarded this as a problem for the head of his messenger service. Mostly she wondered how he could be so calm.

You’re not a child. You’re not a child. She repeated the words every time she felt tears. She would not cry into front of all of these people. But a life without Aunt Alexa . . .

“Follow me,” Marco said.

Giulietta obeyed without question.

Three guards stood in a side room, with Tycho’s page hunched on a seat with her aunt’s lizard on his lap. The boy looked frozen with horror and the guards nervous. The dragonet merely glared balefully. “So,” Marco said to the senior guard. “Tell me again why you weren’t guarding my m-mother’s door.”

“She dismissed us, your highness.”

“Dismissed you?”

“The duchess ordered us to leave. She said that if we were questioned about this we were to say it was her direct command.”

“If you were questioned . . .?”

“Yes, highness.”

Marco considered the point, and Giulietta watched him assess the man who spoke. Typically Venetian, with curling black hair, and the strong nose and full lips seen mostly in the west of the city. He looked Castellano and his accent confirmed it. He would have a family, wife and children. He would have been chosen carefully and had no reason to lie. If he said Aunt Alexa dismissed him . . .

“And then?”

“I heard the duchess scream murder . . .”

Giulietta dug her nails into her hands. How could Marco bear this? She wanted to vomit, and he just stood there impassively. Like a prince, she thought. Like his mother. He watched, considered and listened the way Alexa said a prince should behave. The way Giulietta had never been able to behave herself.

“So you d-disobeyed her order to stay away?”

The guard obviously hadn’t thought of it that way.

“I would have d-done the same,” Marco said.

Relief flooded the man’s face and those either side of him relaxed slightly. “The door was locked, highness. So we broke it down, we were desperate.” There was truth to his words, and he moved carefully, like a man who’d bruised his shoulder. One of the others had cuts on his hands.

“Go on.” Marco said. “Spare no d-detail.”

The man swallowed. “The duchess was on the floor, dead already. There was blood all around her, and her hand . . .” He hesitated. “He was hacking off her ring finger with a knife.”

“Who was?” Giulietta demanded, feeling violently sick.

Marco raised his hand to silence her. “There are three of you. Why d-didn’t you arrest him?”

“Highness, he threw himself through the window.”

“It’s three floors up. He’d have b-broken something.”

The man Marco spoke to glanced at Giulietta, whose throat soured. No, she thought. No . . . She knew instantly what he wanted to say, opened her mouth to stop him from saying it and shook her head.

“Highness.” The man gulped. “It was Lord Tycho.”

“That’s not true.” Giulietta knew her voice was loud. “Make him take it back. Tycho would never . . .” She grabbed her cousin’s arm. “You must believe me. The man’s lying. He has it wrong. It was someone disguised as Tycho.”

“Who survived a d-drop from a third-floor window?”

“Magic,” Giulietta insisted. “Someone made to look like him and given his . . . powers. He’s in Montenegro. How could he possibly be here?”

“My love . . .”

“It can’t be him.” She sounded desperate, even to herself.

“My lady . . .” Pietro, Tycho’s page, stood with Aunt Alexa’s winged lizard in his arms like an ungainly cat.

“What are you doing with dracul?”

“He’s mine.” Pietro took a breath. “I mean, the duchess said I was to have him. That he was mine now.” Pietro rested his head against the dragonet’s forehead and his expression when he lifted his head away was bleak. He looked as sick as she felt. “My master did this.” His words were a whisper. “It was him.”

“Pietro . . .”

“Why would he do this?”

“Return to your d-duties,” Duke Marco told the guards.

Giulietta wanted to accuse the boy of lying. Ask him how he dared betray the man who freed him from prison, ended his life as a street rat and made him his own page. Pietro would be dead if not for Tycho. Dead, or starving in a gutter. But the boy’s face was hollow with guilt and horror, and she knew he’d asked himself those questions already. “Speak,” Marco said.

The boy gulped and held the dragonet tighter. “I saw Lord Tycho in the window, before he threw himself to the ground. Dracul saw more, he saw him arrive and followed when he left. He was met on the edge of the ice by a boat that rowed to a ship further out. The sailors sank the boat.”

How could he know these things? Why didn’t Marco ask how he knew? “I suppose the lizard talks to you?”

“We share thoughts,” Pietro mumbled.

Marco looked intrigued. “Think c-carefully. You share, or you k-know dracul’s?” This new Marco was scary, so icily measured Giulietta wondered if he’d even loved his mother.

“I know his thoughts,” Pietro said finally. “Except they’re not thoughts. I see what he has seen but he doesn’t understand it and I do.”

“Let me.” Taking the winged lizard, Marco put his forehead to the creature’s skull and trembled. His face was unreadable when he gave dracul back. “Clearly it only w-works for you.”

Pietro bit his lip.

“Now t-tell me again how you come to have my m-mother’s gift from the Khan?” The boy repeated his story of sitting outside Lady Giulietta’s door listening to her sob, and how the duchess sent him away. Giulietta wasn’t sure which surprised her most. The boy being there in the first place, or Alexa not being furious to find a page wandering the family floor . . .

“And later,” Pietro said, “she brought me the dragon.”

“She brought you the dragon?” Giulietta said.

“She told me to put my head to his, my lady. Then took the beast away as he had one last task to perform for her.”

Marco looked very thoughtful indeed.