The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

12





The night was chill and Lady Giulietta unhappy at being woken. She wanted poppy, and was put out to be given a sharp-tasting draught of nux vomica instead. Tycho understood. At least he understood sweet dreams were more comforting than being woken, wrapped against the cold and bundled downstairs and through a door between the palace and the basilica. “What must I see for myself?”

The lamp Tycho held stank of fish oil, because all the lamps in Venice stank of fish oil, and its light glittered on glass mosaic and bounced off gold leaf. The rood screen exploded into light as they approached. But Giulietta simply glanced at a fretted brass censor high overhead – as she did every time she visited the cathedral – and her fingers tightened a little on his. Tycho was glad. The passive and drugged young woman of recent weeks was not someone he recognised.

“Down here,” he said.

“No . . .” Lady Giulietta pulled away. “Why are you doing this?” The sight of the stairs to the crypt made her turn away.

“Aunt Alexa says you must see for yourself.”

The habit of obedience carried Lady Giulietta down the stone spiral. When she halted at the bottom, Tycho put his hands on her thin shoulders and walked her into the chilly room. When she saw the small shroud-covered body, she turned away and would have bolted if he hadn’t held her tight. “You can’t make me.”

“Look closely . . .”

“Why are you doing this?”

Because Alexa says you have to discover the truth for yourself. Because Frederick wanted to see you before he left. Because I’m not as kind as you think I am . . . Tycho sighed. “Because I must.” Pulling back the sheet, he lifted his lamp to light the naked infant. “Is this Leo . . .?”

He wanted to say, This isn’t Leo, is it? Look carefully, you’ll see it’s someone else’s child. But that was the best he could offer. Bending close, she forced herself to look carefully at the small boy, the sharp edges of her face softening as hope melted them. The horror at what Tycho was making her do ebbed, the bitterness left her mouth. Happiness, which went missing when she thought Leo dead, flickered in her eyes, like life returning. He held her then, fighting his own emotions as she sobbed into his shoulder, her body shaking. “I shouldn’t be happy.”

“Yes, you should.”

“Not when . . .” Reaching down, she stroked the dead child’s face and flinched at the cold. “How?” She asked, meaning the scar.

“A knife. Maybe a little magic. It’s deep enough to make the scar and shallow enough to have healed quickly.” The who was obvious; although he let her get there herself.

“So Leo is alive?” Her eyes widened as she realised something else. “My Uncle Alonzo has him?”

Nodding, Tycho led her to the second slab. He didn’t bother to pull back the shroud this time. “The last duke had a natural daughter by one of his mistresses and kept it from your aunt. The girl was sent to the mainland and Alexa doubts she even knew her parentage.”

“Why would he go to this much trouble?”

Tycho found himself on the edge of saying something he’d never put into words for her before. Giulietta knew – how could she not? – he’d drunk her blood the night he spared Prince Leopold’s life, having tasted a single drop months before when he found her in the basilica. Since she was too tired to understand how he sensed sound and colours and smell, and he barely understood that himself, and he couldn’t bring himself to admit her blood was an addiction, he simply told her different people’s blood smelt differently to him. Hers made him drunk. This woman . . .

“There’s a family likeness?” See, he knew she was quick.

“She was killed so I’d smell Millioni blood . . . I’d rush into Leo’s nursery, smell Millioni blood and see the baby’s scar. I’d believe the child was yours.”

Picking up the lamp, Tycho edged Giulietta towards the stairs and turned for a final look. A woman and a child killed to tie together a plot Alexa still needed to unpick and he needed to stop. The Millioni left death in their wake. All powerful families did. Am I worse because I kill face to face?

Venice had its Blades, other kings and cities had their own assassins, less good in Venice’s opinion, and in this the city was right. Atilo had trained his followers well and Tycho was the best of them. He’d failed in this, though. It didn’t matter that the child was in Leo’s gown, in Leo’s cot, and had Leo’s scar.

You should have made sure.

“Uncle Alonzo’s going to claim Leo for his own, isn’t he? That’s why he married Maria Dolphini. Why she was bundled in that coat. That’s why she went with him when anyone sensible would have stayed at home.”

“Yes . . .” It was the only way Leo’s abduction made sense. Alonzo couldn’t keep the child openly without making an even worse enemy of Alexa. And, while having him killed would have been a decisive and irrevocable decision, and Alonzo liked decisive and irrevocable, he was the child’s father. Only he could hardly claim parentage of an infant produced under the directions of an alchemist excommunicated by the Pope. But if Alonzo presented the child as Maria’s . . .

It was brilliant. As his heir by Maria Dolphini, the daughter of one of the richest and most ambitious nobles in Venice, the child’s future was gilded. Alonzo could count on Dolphini money to carry him to the throne. The thought of Maria Dolphini as duchess and her son as heir would guarantee that.