The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

4





“No, I don’t want Alonzo killed.” Duchess Alexa, Mongol wife of the late duke and mother to Marco the Simpleton, who seemed daily less simple, looked at the restless young man in front of her desk and smiled sympathetically. She’d known his suggestion before he suggested it. This was not magic. She’d want the same if she was Tycho; young, full of life and in love with her niece.

“My lady. Let me do this.”

Alexa shook her head.

“Please . . .”

“Tycho!” Now her hated brother-in-law was headed for exile she was sole Regent and intended to use the power. Mostly she liked her life; albeit in someone else’s city, ruling someone else’s people, and having taken a name not her own. But she was dying of old age and a disease ate her insides. She had no time for new complexities. “You will not mention this again.”

The boy smouldered like phosphorus dropped into water, his anger so palpable that she sighed. It wasn’t that Alexa even objected to him killing her brother-in-law, she simply knew it to be unwise. Pulling a stiletto from his belt, the boy absent-mindedly reached for a sharpening stone.

“Put those away . . .”

He looked up in surprise. “It relaxes me.”

The boy’s hair was wolf-grey, his cheekbones high and his amber-flecked eyes the most arresting she’d ever seen. He could see perfectly in darkness but the daylight terrified him. Beautiful but flawed, with a hint of danger. What young girl looked for more? Alexa didn’t blame her niece for being infatuated, for all she wished it otherwise. “It must be sharp surely?”

Dropping the whetstone into his pocket, Tycho drew the blade across his thumb and watched blood bead in a dark line. Almost as quickly, the cut began to heal. “Sharp enough to solve your problem.”

Alexa sighed. Above her city the black sky held faint traces of purple. The canals were quiet, the Venetian crowd still subdued following the recent departure of a Byzantine fleet that had blockaded the lagoon. There was a chill to the night air that had been missing a week earlier. “You know the rules.”

“Ignore them. No one will suspect you.”

“Of course they will.” Her voice was dry. “Everyone will suspect me. What you mean is they won’t be able to prove it.”

“You aren’t worried about letting him go into exile?”

She started to deny it and decided not to bother. Somehow she always ended up telling Tycho the truth. Well, mostly. But then Tycho had found her with a map on her desk, outlining Montenegro’s territories in red ink. “It’s complicated.”

The boy ginned. Everything in Venice was.

“I ordered him to take exile. I can hardly complain if he offers to rid the Adriatic of pirates, protect our Schiavoni colonies and defeat a ravening horde of renegade Crucifers, can I? Any one of those would have brought half the Council back to his side, and there’s always a chance . . .”

“One of the three might kill him?”

Alexa nodded.

“Don’t leave it to chance,” Tycho said seriously. “We can make it look natural if you want. Give me the right poison and he can die in his sleep. Think of the solemn service, his weeping new widow, the whole family dressed in black and saying prayers for his soul. You can have sculptors carve a beautiful marble tomb.”

“This is about Giulietta, isn’t it?”

Of course it was. Her brother-in-law had treated Giulietta abominably. Fathering a son on her as Saracens bred horses, with a goose quill of his own seed, so she could bear an heir for Janus of Cyprus, a king she never married. If she was Tycho she’d want Alonzo dead, too.

“It’s not the rules governing the Assassini. I gave my husband my word I’d let his brother live. Marco made me swear this on his deathbed. You think for one minute that if I hadn’t . . .?” He’d be dead a hundred times. Dead within the first week. Not killing Alonzo was the hardest thing she’d done. I took him to my bed, she thought bitterly. To protect my child I took him to my bed, and he tried to poison my son anyway.

How can I break my word now? “Alonzo will leave for Montenegro the day after tomorrow. You will not kill him. Understand me?”

Tycho bowed.

“Good,” Alexa said. “You may go . . .”

She’d considered having Tycho killed and still wondered if it would be the sensible thing for her to do. He was brilliant, beautiful and dangerous. All the things that attracted her niece worried her. But how could she hold his exotic looks against him. Over the years she’d suffered the stares and glances of her late husband’s subjects, who’d apparently expected her to have golden eyes or scales. As if the docks at Arzanale and the quay-sides on the Canalasso hadn’t already been full of Mongols and every other race beside. On her husband’s death she adopted the widow’s veil, finding relief in the fact that the people she ruled could no longer see her clearly. Her son, however, with his sallow skin and almond eyes they saw clearly enough, and blamed her for his foreignness.

The Venetians were barbarians – backward in their manners, ignorant of the sciences, perversely superstitious – but her marriage had been necessary to seal a trade treaty and her husband proved no worse-tempered than any other man, and more willing to listen to reason than most. In this he’d been like his city. The one thing she could say for the Venetians was that the rest of Europe was worse.