The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

3





When the patriarch called San Marco “Europe’s most beautiful basilica”, he wasn’t simply pandering to Venetian pride. By the year of Our Lord 1408 there had been a church on the site of San Marco for six hundred years; admittedly not the same church, and the basilica had been rebuilt, extended, had new domes and new frescos until few could imagine what the original must have looked like, but there had been a church and it had been famously beautiful even back then. Now the wedding congregation stood before a flamboyantly jewelled rood screen, beneath a stern-faced Christ, while a fretted brass censor swung overhead beneath the largest of the five domes. Venice was once a colony of Constantinople, and it showed in the basilica’s Eastern architecture.

Lady Giulietta had never doubted it was beautiful, for all it was from here she’d been abducted the night before she left to marry King Janus of Cyprus, a marriage that never happened. Since Janus had been a Black Crucifer and his previous marriage had been complicated, she was glad.

“You’re safe,” Tycho whispered.

“What?”

“You shivered.”

Folding her fingers into his, she gripped tight and smiled when he turned to watch her, nodding at the couple before the rood screen to say he should be watching them instead. For once her uncle had discarded his breastplate. His bride huddled inside a huge fur coat against the cold. The coat was made from the pelt of a brown bear, and legend had it that Alonzo stabbed the bear himself. Legend also said he gutted the animal, ate its heart and skinned its carcase, washing its bloody pelt in a stream as clear and cold as ice.

The problem with Uncle Alonzo was that it could be true.

His bravery in battle was renowned and his skills as a general had brought him fame before she was born. Had Uncle Marco not died and his idiot son become duke, Uncle Alonzo would be happily besieging a castle somewhere. It was Aunt Alexa who said Alonzo fought the bear hand to hard. That he hadn’t claimed it himself only made Giulietta believe it more. Still, the bearskin made a weird wedding dress. So large and bulky, almost as if Maria was trying to hide something.

Lady Giulietta nudged Tycho. “Don’t you think Maria looks . . .”

“Like a girl who needs to get married in a hurry?”

She shushed him. Maria was a few years older than them, so somewhere in her early twenties; the ideal of beauty, heavy breasted and full-hipped, with long hair dyed Venetian-red as tradition demanded. Giulietta’s own hair was naturally red, her body slighter and her figure much less arresting. Her aunt always said Giulietta would grow into her looks and she had; although she’d never believed Aunt Alexa back then. For the first time Giulietta could remember she felt like her skin fitted as it was meant to fit. Maria, however, looked bulkier than Giulietta recalled.

If she was pregnant then Alonzo leaving for his estates on Corfu made perfect sense. Taking her on campaign less so, but even that was safer than leaving her in Venice for Aunt Alexa to poison.

The rumour of a Grand Canal full of dead fish came from her aunt’s earliest years in the city. Whispers said she dropped a single glass vial of poison, barely larger than a child’s finger, and every fish in the Canalasso died. Like the story of Alonzo and the bear, Alexa and her vial had gone beyond rumour into legend.

“But what does Uncle Alonzo get out of this?” When Tycho looked round, Giulietta realised she’d said the words aloud. It was obvious what Maria got. She got to be a princess of Serenissima and live in the ducal palace. Well, she would have done if Alonzo weren’t being quietly banished. But Maria . . .?

“He gets that,” Tycho whispered.

Maria’s father dripped gold. As rich as a Dolphini, the cittadini said. And as vulgar, the nobles added under their breath. He was dressed in the gaudy grandeur Giulietta expected. A doublet of scarlet velvet glistened wine-dark in the shadows. His matching cloak was yellow-lined. The gold chain around his neck was thick enough to moor a barge. He stood next to Lord Bribanzo, equally rich if less gaudily dressed. Between them they were richer than the Millioni, and Giulietta’s family was the richest in Europe. If Maria produced a son there would be no stopping Lord Dolphini’s ambitions. The old man would lavish gold on his princely grandchild and Dolphini money would strengthen Alonzo’s position.

“I bet Aunt Alexa asks you to kill her.”

“She can’t,” Tycho said. “It’s not allowed.” The rules governing his position as Duke’s Blade, head of Venice’s cadre of assassins, prevented the duchess using the Assassini against any member of the Millioni family, just as they prevented the Regent from doing the same. Once married, Maria was untouchable.

“Really?” Giulietta asked. She sighed.

It was not that she wanted Maria dead . . . But she’d always hoped her aunt would one day kill her uncle. Had Venice always been this dark and twisted, this complicated and divided? Was it like this in Milan, Paris and Vienna? Lady Giulietta sucked her teeth, running through the dark reputations of those cities, and decided it probably was. The whole world was like this and Giulietta wished it was better. If she was ruler of Venice it would be different. She’d insist on it.

Up ahead, the patriarch was asking Maria if she married freely. Having been assured she did, he asked Alonzo if he would be faithful to death. His booming boast that he would be faithful to death and beyond was not in the order of service but heads nodded approvingly in the small party around him. Rings were exchanged, the blessing was given and the marriage was done.

This was the shorter service. Without a Mass, without a choir, and without much by way of guests or congregation; but it was done and it was legal. Alonzo il Millioni was married and the young woman beside him was now a Millioni princess and looking slightly stunned by the turn of events.