The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

46





The marriage of Lady Giulietta de Felice di Millioni to His Highness Prince Frederick zum Bas Friedland, natural son of Emperor Sigismund of Germany, took place in the middle of the afternoon in the Millioni’s private chapel, otherwise known as the Basilica San Marco. A church widely agreed to be Europe’s most beautiful.

San Marco was at its most magnificent. Mosaics had been mopped, the floors swept and the bodies in the crypt discreetly buried. One in a pauper’s grave on an island to the north, another under the flagstones of the Millioni crypt, an act of respect from the new duchess to a woman who was probably her cousin for all neither of them had known this. The last body, that of Duchess Alexa, had been interred with great splendour beside that of her husband, Marco the Just, father of the late Marco the Great. The new duchess did this because she hoped her Aunt Alexa’s ghost would approve. Almost everything Giulietta did and had done since that hideous morning on the ship at Sveti Stefan, when they brought her news of Marco’s, Uncle Alonzo’s and Tycho’s death had been based on what she thought Aunt Alexa would do.

Aunt Alexa would demand Giulietta be crowned before being married so no one could doubt she married Frederick as a reigning duchess. If the basilica was clean, aired, swept and lavishly decorated for the wedding it was because Giulietta had demanded her coronation that morning be magnificent. Aunt Alexa would have wanted it magnificent. She would have wanted Giulietta to marry Frederick, too. So that was going to happen.

He was Sigismund’s bastard. Her city had thrown in its lot with the Holy Roman Empire, allied to it but not part of it. Byzantium was an enemy now. Sigismund’s power was needed as a counterweight. The only problem with this was that Giulietta and Frederick had barely exchanged a word since she received the news on the quayside at Sveti Stefan of Marco’s death.

Maybe it was guilt? Frederick had thrown guilt in her face.

Why else would she refuse to talk to him? Why else would she refuse to let him talk to her? He’d greeted the news that she’d agreed to go through with the marriage suggested by Emperor Sigismund with disbelief, fury and then contempt. Having disappeared for three days, he was found drunk in a brothel. Far from being publicly outraged, Lady Giulietta let it be known she was delighted to have proof his interests ran in the right direction, unlike his half-brother Leopold. That bit went unspoken – at least by her.

Aunt Alexa would have been proud.

Just as she would have been impressed by the icy dignity with which the Duchess Giulietta entered the basilica and made her way in stately procession through the nobles and richer cittadini gathered under the stern gaze of the messiah painted on the dome above. Prince Frederick stood before the altar, dressed in magnificent silks and velvets. His entourage occupied one side at the front of the congregation. They were as magnificently dressed and as unsmiling. It had taken a direct order from his father to make this marriage happen. His friends knew exactly how Frederick felt about that and their scowls showed they felt the same.

They believed he’d rescued Lady Giulietta from certain death, and his reward was to be cold-shouldered and treated with contempt. The two Venetian knights who rode with the krieghund to the coast agreed. Giulietta’s reading of this . . .? If Frederick had stayed he could have stopped Marco’s stupid duel. Everyone was talking about how magnificent his death was. Marco the Simpleton finding his common sense and courage and beating his fearsome uncle in hand-to-hand combat, just the two of them, under traditional rules.

How could anyone be stupid enough to let Marco fight a duel? Why had Tycho not stopped it? And why had he then been stupid enough to die trying to rescue Marco from the pool into which he’d thrown himself? They had fought in armour. How could Tycho possibly think he could save Marco?

Ahead of her, someone coughed discreetly.

Looking up, Lady Giulietta saw the Patriarch of Venice, magnificent in his embroidered robes. “Your highness . . .?”

Giulietta nodded. She was as ready as she’d ever be.

A dozen Assassini were hidden unobtrusively among the congregation, a noble from the mainland here, a cittadino no one quite recognised there. They were the only people in the basilica carrying hidden weapons. At least Lady Amelia hoped so.

She watched Duchess Giulietta from an upper balcony. Newly made mistress of the Assassini, she had her best people in the crowd. God knows, they were few enough and she’d be recruiting for months and possibly years to come. She’d summoned back every agent she had, using the month between Giulietta’s landing and her coronation to send for Assassini from Paris, Constantinople and Vienna.

Her earliest shock, apart from Lady Giulietta accepting Tycho’s recommendation of her without question, was how efficient his archives had been. For a libertine said to live in exotic squalor his notes on which agent was where, how many retirees could be drawn on and who had failed testing but could still be used in emergencies were frighteningly clear.

The squalor had been a disguise, Amelia decided.

Along with Tycho’s house in San Aponal she’d inherited a Jewish servant called Rachel, who ran Tycho’s house with quiet efficiency and knew more about the workings of the Assassini than Amelia expected or thought wise. Until she realised Rachel was the Assassini’s unofficial archivist and the reason everything was so efficiently ordered. She’d also inherited oversight of Pietro, once a Venetian street child, then Tycho’s servant and now Giulietta’s page. Pietro stood just behind his mistress, his dark hair freshly cut and his scarlet doublet embroidered with gold and silver. Since the sumptuary laws banned servants from wearing silver thread and those below armiger from wearing gold, the duchess must have declared him noble. What oversight meant Amelia was waiting to be told.

She knew the boy was Assassini trained, and could see the advantage of having someone with that training close to the duchess. Lady Amelia’s own title and noble status had been given for undefined services during the Montenegrin campaign. Since the official version of the campaign had yet to be written, she was also waiting to discover what these were. She doubted the slaughter of Duke Tiresias, briefly Byzantine patron to Prince Alonzo, would be numbered among them, at least officially. With the house and her title came a gold chain set off by her black skin. She still wore tarnished silver thimbles on her braids, though, simply because she enjoyed the disquiet they caused.

“What do you think?” asked the hooded figure next to her.

“What do you expect me to think?” Amelia glanced from Lady Giulietta standing stiffly before the patriarch to Frederick, stony-faced beside her. “This is a disaster. They can barely stand to be in each other’s presence.”

“I’d heard she loved him.”

Lady Amelia turned to look at the monk also hidden in the upper balcony’s half-darkness, so invisible in the shadows he had to be Assassini trained. “Jealous?” she demanded.

“Of course I’m jealous . . .” Tycho stared at the couple at the altar and wondered why he’d risked daylight, no matter how well wrapped, to see this. Why didn’t he simply stay in his room, stab a knife into his own heart and twist?

Amelia had seemed unsurprised to see him when he appeared at Sveti Stefan, demanding she smuggle him aboard Giulietta’s ship. The real favour came a week later when she produced the formula for Dr Crow’s ointment and the address of a discreet Moorish pharmacist who could make it up for him. Lord Atilo had the formula filed and Tycho had never thought to look. So now he had daylight freedom of a limited sort, although the sun’s brightness still terrified him.

He had one more job to do, though, before he could leave the city, probably the most difficult of his life for all that no one would die. “You have good people in the kitchens?”

Amelia glared at him.

Of course she did. Poison and courts went together.

Pulling a leather pouch from his pocket, he untied its mouth and Amelia went very still as he rolled two pills into the palm of his gloved hand. The pills were tired-looking and grubby. One had once been silver but most of this had worn away. The other had fragments of gold leaf sticking to its surface.

“What are those?”

“The solution to that.” He’d saved them the night Giulietta insisted they were unnecessary. Lying in his arms, she sworn she’d love him for ever.

“And what, exactly, do they do?”

The balance between Amelia and him had changed. She was mistress of the Assassini and took the responsibility seriously. She spoke from the assumption that she had a right to ask and he would answer.

“Well . . .?

“Dr Crow made them.” A reply that did little to reassure her. “Remember the feast for Frederick?” Tycho asked.

“I was in Paris, remember?” She flicked her gaze to where the patriarch was asking Duchess Giulietta if she took Prince Frederick as her husband. Her answer was flat but it was still yes.

“She’s in shock,” Amelia said.

Tycho looked at her.

“The duchess is sleepwalking through this. She’s been sleepwalking through everything since you and Marco died. What would Aunt Alexa do? I’ve heard her ask it aloud. Everyone close to her has heard it.”

What would Aunt Alexa do?

“Aunt Alexa would want her to take these.”

“Convince me,” Amelia said.

The kitchens were steamy and filled with cooks screaming at undercooks about their failings. In one corner, a confectioner reduced his young assistant to tears with a fluency and viciousness that stunned Tycho. It seemed an egg white had not set properly.

An ox roasted on an iron spit over a fire pit. In the chimneys, whole hogs cooked on lesser spits turned by children over hissing charcoal that singed bristles as dripping fat sent flames jumping. The area smelt of crackling. Vast pies of salt pastry not meant to be eaten were being filled with a mix of hot mutton, black pepper and steaming winter vegetables. The last peacock in the zoo was honey-glazed and almost roasted. Barrels of red wine stood warming. More barrels of strong and weak beer were being trundled across stone floors towards a trestle table that held clay jugs for lower tables and glass ones for high tables.

The crowd in the banqueting hall beyond the doors were drunk and already half stuffed with fresh bread, their fingers slick with oil from a stew of chicken and root vegetables better suited to the table of a cittadino. Barely a scrap remained on the dishes being returned to the kitchens. Tonight might not be the richest feast Venice had seen but it was better than any given in recent months.

The great banqueting hall, first demanded by Marco the Just, and overseen by Duchess Alexa, had been finished on the orders of Marco the Great, the late and much lamented duke. Its panelling was waxed and the painted ceiling finally in place; even the windows had been fitted. Politeness demanded that no one mention the last time Prince Frederick attended a feast in that hall assassins had tried to kill him.

“Over there.” Amelia nodded to the far side of the kitchens.

Two White Crucifers stood by a table watching the preparations carefully. Every so often, one would abandon his post to test food, sniff meat or examine dried peppercorns before allowing them to be ground. They were Giulietta’s and Frederick’s official food tasters. The Crucifers looked up suspiciously.

“Duchess Giulietta’s orders,” Amelia said.

For a second it looked as if the men would demand her right to use the duchess’s name, then they took in the richness of her gown and the value of the gold chain around her neck and accepted she’d be stupid to use the name without authority. They had the closed faces of men who didn’t like women at the best of times, certainly not ones who met their gaze. “And him?” the taller demanded.

Tycho was dressed simply, his robes long and priest-like.

“An alchemist,” Amelia said. “Also here on her orders.”

The priests scowled as Tycho guessed they would.

“You taste the food first,” Amelia told them. “We taste it second. Only then does it go through to the duke and duchess.” The Crucifers thought about that and scowled at each other as they tried to come up with a reason that having the food double-tasted was a bad idea beyond hurt pride.

“The first dish has already gone.”

“True,” Lady Amelia admitted. “But since Giulietta and Frederick have yet to seat themselves they will not have eaten it . . .” Maybe it was the familiarity with which the richly dressed young Nubian used the royal names, and used them with confidence . . . Perhaps it was simply that she knew the couple were not yet seated, which he didn’t, but the elder Crucifer accepted defeat.

“We’ll be watching.”

“Especially him.” The younger one nodded.

They were true to their word. They watched carefully as Tycho dug his borrowed spoon into a bowl of fish soup they’d already tasted, and barely bothered to watch Amelia take her turn afterwards. Over the next hour and a half they watched Tycho chew a slice of beef, pinch a succulent sliver from a piglet, and spoon mutton and winter vegetable pie into his mouth.

Food tasters kept their employers alive. They tasted the wine and the water, the bread and the meat and the wizened winter vegetables that had been plumped up by soaking in water and seasoned with black pepper and cinnamon to hide their bitterness. They tasted everything. “I think we’re done,” Tycho said.

Lady Amelia nodded.

“You don’t intend to taste that?” The younger Crucifer pointed at a heart-shaped sweetmeat of diced fruit, honeycomb and spices carried by a young page. The heart was cut diagonally so Giulietta could take the top piece and her new husband the bottom. “You,” the Crucifer said. “Here.”

The boy glared at him.

He wore Millioni scarlet, decorated with gold and silver. At his hip hung an ornate dagger that he could only be wearing by dispensation of the duchess herself. “If you would,” the priest added, more politely.

The boy brought his dish across.

His eyes widened as he glanced at Tycho’s hooded face and his mouth opened. He was trembling when Lady Amelia stepped forward and gripped the boy’s cheeks with fingers that dug into his skin. “Has anyone else touched this?”

She tapped the dish – in a rapid sequence that announced Assassini business. When she released him, Pietro bowed. “No, my lady.” He hesitated. “I mean, the confectioner obviously, but . . .”

She waved his fumbling away.

The priests tasted it first, taking tentative scoops from beneath both bits of the heart. Lady Amelia’s interrogation of the page had given them a new respect for her. She had to be someone if she treated a royal page like one of her own. They watched Tycho, although less closely than before. There was little enough for them to see. He scooped out sweetmeat, tasted it and did his best to smooth the sides. His smile was bleak as he nodded to say he felt no ill effects.

It was Lady Amelia’s turn. But the Crucifers were watching the page, wondering why he was standing so rigidly to attention and obviously fighting his emotions. The boy glanced at the hooded figure, who said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

The page stared at him.

“Your master, Tycho bel Angelo. I’m told he drowned in Montenegro trying to save Duke Marco after the duke slaughtered his traitorous uncle . . . It must be hard for someone so young to handle the loss.”

Pietro’s chin came up. I’m not so young, his gesture said. Of course I understand. A second later, he asked. “You think he’s really dead?”

“So everyone says.”

The boy nodded sadly and turned his attention to Lady Amelia, who was smoothing the exact points on the sweetmeat heart where the happy couple could be expected to scoop the first mouthfuls to offer each other. “Everything is as it should be,” she said.

Pietro bowed to her, nodded to the Crucifers, considered carefully . . . And bowed deeply to the hooded figure, touching his clenched fist to his heart. Then he picked up the sweetmeat and turned for the door.

Inside his hood, Tycho smiled sadly.

So much to give away in one day. His heart, his happiness, Giulietta’s love for him, now Pietro “You want to see how this ends?” Amelia asked sympathetically, her voice pitched too low for the priests to hear.

Tycho didn’t but he knew he should.

A balcony ran the length of the banqueting hall, fretted with gilded wood to let women watch from above without being seen by men at the tables below. It was years since feasts had been for men only, but the new hall had been designed by the late duke’s father and Marco the Just had insisted on a balcony in the old style. Looking at the archers stationed behind the fretwork Tycho decided the old duke had known precisely what he was doing.

“The krieghund are targeted,” Amelia said, nodding down to where Frederick’s companions sat together. “But they can’t prove it.”

At the top table Giulietta and Frederick ate in silence. Every so often, Frederick would glance across and look away if she caught him watching. Occasionally, she’d look at him. There was something hard in her gaze. Yet puzzled, as if she wondered how she found herself sitting next to him.

“He’s terrified of her,” Amelia said.

“Why?” Tycho demanded.

“Because she’s terrifying.”

Is she? At times, she’d seemed to him spoilt, unhappy or miserable . . . At others, kind, gentle and thoughtful. One didn’t make the other untrue. People were complicated.

“Are you leaving Venice because of Frederick?”

“No,” Tycho said, “I”m leaving because of me.” He looked at Giulietta and his mouth twisted with sadness. “Well,” he corrected, “I’m leaving because of us. Giulietta made me happy.”

“And you?” Amelia asked.

“I made her scared.”

Amelia looked surprised. “You knew that?”

Not until the words came out of my mouth just then, Tycho thought. Although he didn’t say it. “Watch,” he said.

Part of him was scared Dr Crow’s pills were too old to be potent, and part of him hoped that was true, the dark part. Why should he want to help them fall in love with each other? Pietro was approaching the top table, carrying the gold salver containing the sweetmeat heart. He carried it steadily, staring straight ahead. Stopping in front of Giulietta and Frederick, he knelt and held out the plate.

Tradition said they should take the heart, lift it together and put it between them on the table. When Giulietta did nothing, Frederick reached for the salver and she hastily grabbed the other side. The plate tilted and the banqueting hall fell silent, fearing a bad omen. The dish made it to the table with only a slight clang.

Frederick’s sigh of relief was so explosive Giulietta smiled, despite herself. She opened her mouth for the forkful he offered and her hand touched his as she steadied his fingers. Frederick looked as if he might cry in gratitude and Tycho had to remind himself that this was a krieghund.

At the high table, Giulietta lifted her own fork to Prince Frederick’s mouth, nodding to say they could both now eat. He ate from the fork she offered, just as she ate from the fork he held, their arms twisted through each other’s as tradition demanded. Both chewed as one, but Giulietta swallowed first.

Leaning forward, she asked something softly.

Prince Frederick looked at the crowd and nodded carefully. He swallowed his mouthful and asked something in his turn. It was like watching two children navigate their way through a field of thorns. Frederick’s fingers touched the back of her hand and she smiled. It was sad but kind. He risked saying something else, something that mattered, because her lips trembled.

She wiped her eye crossly, then shrugged and nodded.

Frederick dried her tears as tenderly as if the great banqueting hall were empty and they were the only people there. No, as if they were the only two people in the world. “Remind me again how this works?” Amelia said.

Tycho ignored her.

The couple at the top table sat with their heads close together. He seemed to be apologising and she was apologising back. That was how their marriage would work out. She’d be protective, and he’d have fits of unexpected fierceness if he felt her threatened or slighted. They’d muddle through because that’s what people did. Those on the lower tables returned to their own meals and conversation grew loud in a mixture of drunkenness and relief. The banquet would be remembered fondly and be coloured by myth. A feast to celebrate the end of winter as much as their marriage or Giulietta’s coronation. A winter when ice covered the lagoon and the Grand Canal was so frozen carriages used it as a road. When hunger drove wolves down from their mountains, and Marco the Simple became Marco the Great in a single night by killing his uncle and clearing the way for Giulietta to take the throne.

“You’re smiling,” Amelia said.

“Look at them.”

He had to be happy for Giulietta; how else could he survive without going down there and slaughtering the lot of them? She had her head bent even closer, and when Frederick dipped to kiss her forehead, she smiled. How much of it was Dr Crow’s pills? How much forgiveness happened before the love potion had time to work its effect. Tycho didn’t know and refused to let himself wonder.

“She’ll forget you?”

“Not exactly. I’ll simply stop mattering.”

“And Leopold . . .?

“Only Frederick will matter.” Tycho glanced down and corrected himself. “Only he matters. The rest of us? Fond memories at best.”

Frederick would be faithful and Giulietta would be faithful, and they would become that most unlikely and dangerous of hybrids, co-rulers who liked and respected each other. She would deliver Sigismund a city. He’d give her imperial protection. The issue of an heir was already decided.

Tycho had no doubt she’d give Frederick children and he’d dote on them, the memory of his lost daughter ever in his mind. Smiling again, Tycho straightened his shoulders. Who knew what the future would bring? What he would see, what he would learn, what he would do. “I leave the city tonight . . .”

“You travel alone?” Amelia asked.

“Of course. Who would come with me?”

The night he dived off the edge of the waterfall Tycho acted on impulse. After the chaos of his early months in Venice, he’d wanted to believe life unfolded to a plan but that night he simply reacted. Marco was the one with a plan, he realised now.

He’d always intended to sacrifice himself to clear the throne for Giulietta, unless he’d simply wanted revenge. There would be time to ask him later. A whole lifetime of it, then another and another . . .

Bending his knees, Marco had pushed away from the edge of the drop and pulled Alonzo after him. And time had slowed as Tycho crossed the trampled circle, drew his dagger and launched himself over the edge. Marco hit the water just ahead of Alonzo, with Tycho tumbling after.

The weight of their armour took all three under.

Freezing water closed over Tycho as he fought the weight of his own breastplate, the drag of the sword he’d slung across his back. It was dark beneath the water. As dark and cold and unforgiving as for ever. Finding Marco, he’d followed him down into the slime, grit and rock of the waterfall’s floor. Where he slashed the strap fixing the axe in Marco’s chest to Alonzo’s wrist and kicked for the surface.

Alonzo he left there.

Tycho almost made it, although he had to scale the last few feet by clinging to rock and dragging Marco behind him, the weight of the duke increasing as they left the water. Rolling Marco on to a ledge, he looked down and saw the duke’s eyes flutter open. The spike axe still jutted from his chest.

“You have a choice,” Tycho said.

Marco shook his head. “I’m dying,” he whispered.

“I’m offering you life.”

The duke looked up and smiled. “My mother said you were a broken angel. Perhaps the last of your kind. You don’t look that angelic to me.”

Biting into his own wrist, Tycho held it out.

Marco’s eyes widened and he nodded, drinking with increasing urgency until Tycho judged him strong enough for what came next. He pulled the axe free, and drank from the wound, feeling cold steel against his lips. The night was dark and the pool deep in shadow. High above, Tycho could hear shouts and cries, orders and counter-orders. No one saw what happened in the darkness at the edge of the pool. At least no one who’d be telling.