Kings and Assassins (24 page)

“Did you expect otherwise? You are naïve,” he said. “As for myself, I have been expecting something of this nature once it became clear that, rumors or not, I am not destined for the gallows. I simply hadn't expected the attempt to be this clumsy. Disappointing, as I'm sure you'll agree.”

“No,” Psyke said. “No, I'm not disappointed. Assassination and murder are distasteful ways to remove one's enemy. A coward's way.”

“
I didn't kill Aris,”
he said.

“He's dead, by saber and by pistol, and here I see you familiar with both. A northern saber carved out his heart, an uncommon tool in Antyre.”

“Not uncommon for a man to cling to the weapon he learned with,” Janus said. “Not uncommon at all to think an Itarusine might choose such a blade to strike with. Why blame me, sweet Psyke, when Ivor makes a far more likely foe?”

“Ivor has an alibi,” Psyke began.

“As do I…” Janus grated.

It made him wild; did no one see? Did they all prefer the known villain, the small villain? Was it some bizarre Antyrrian pride or the well-vaunted ability of the public to deny what was real?

Look outward first for danger
. The Relict rats had muttered that instead of their prayers. Known dangers—squabbles over food, over allies, over coppers—were less threatening. After all, the rats might all fight for the same prize, but they at least shared belief in its value. An outsider—the Particulars, a robbed merchant—might not,
might destroy the prize in their attempt to get at the rats. Ivor was no different. He didn't value Antyre beyond the power the throne offered.

Janus drew her toward him, her cold hand in his, determined to win her this time. “Ivor Grigorian killed Aris. His father lives on and on, his brothers circling like wolves, and Ivor hungers for his own throne, one not torn apart in the struggle for it. It was Ivor's man that struck, not mine.”

“Even if you are innocent of Aris's death—”

“I am,” he said.

“Do you think that absolves you? To be blameless of this one death when so many others can be laid to your name?” Her lashes, tangled gold, shielded her gaze, but Janus, watching closely, knew her attention was for Marchand and the splintered hole in his vest.

Janus growled. “They entered with intent to kill me. Self-defense is no crime.”

“The others?” she said. “How many enemies you must have if you would cry self-defense for all of them.”

“Kritos. Vornatti. Last. Maledicte would have killed them regardless. You cannot lay them at my feet.”

“And Amarantha? Her coachman? The
child?
Would Maledicte have killed them without your command?”

“Ani drove him more than I ever did,” Janus said.

“Ani feeds on jealousy and anger. Amarantha married your father, not you. Her murder was political, not a matter for either Mal or Ani, of benefit only to you. And the babe, the infant earl who supplanted you for the title you hold now—”

Janus looked at his own hands, recalling how the simple weight of his blade had done the work for him, sinking through Auron's tender skin.

Psyke's trailed-off words belatedly caught his attention, and he looked up to find her backing away, her mouth working, a new and terrible knowledge in an expression already burdened with too much truth.

She drew in a steady breath and froze like prey before the hunt, hoping to be unseen.

A pale tongue wetted her lips; her voice was thin edged but unafraid when she spoke again. “I own Auron's death struck me as peculiar at the time. If Maledicte had killed the babe, why leave Adiran alive and witness to it?”

“Why dwell on it?” Janus said, surprised that he managed to sound so uninterested when his heart beat so fast. What the assassination attempt hadn't accomplished, his wife had. “The past is past. You might make yourself useful and ring for Rue. I'd like to have the bodies cleaned away before they start to—”

“The past informs the present and the future,” Psyke said. “How can I believe your protestations of innocence, when you killed Auron yourself?”

His breath snagged, made him cough, taking in great gasps of tainted air. He dropped his dressing gown, reached blindly out for the breeches in the airing cupboard. “Risky accusations,” he said, “if I am the murderer you claim me to be.” He dressed hastily, keeping her in sight.

She flinched when Janus stalked past her and reclaimed his blade. Her hands flew up, as if they could shield her heart.

“Are you afraid,” he asked, “or do you merely simulate it? You didn't die of poison. Will a saber do it?”

“Try it and see,” Psyke said, and it wasn't her voice at all, but something else, a whisper that raised thunder and shadows in the room, drowned the fire glow, and put them both into darkness.

Into that charged darkness, their doubled, panting breath, came a single prosaic hammering on the door. “My lord? My lady?”

Rue opened the door when they made no response, spilling torchlight into the room; Janus lowered the blade, still wary but unwilling to be caught holding his diminutive wife off as if she were more a threat than the assassins who had tried for his life.

AWN CREPT IN TOO SLOWLY
for Janus's nerves. After Rue had turned Janus's chambers into a hive of kingsguards and servants, Janus had been sent off to bed in Psyke's quarters like an overtired child. Psyke, gone pliant and sweet in the company of the guards, came after him, her eyes glazed and nearly as vacant as Adirans, exhausted or in shock.

She curled up on her mattress, finding the spot she had left less than an hour ago, sighing into it as if it were still warm, going boneless into sleep or death. It raised all the hairs on his nape and kept him wakeful through the rest of the night, listening to her alternate between deathly silence, even her breathing gone, to fitful mutterings spanning several languages.

Had his childhood instincts held sway, he would have fled the palace and disarmed the snare he felt closing about him by taking himself from it. But those days were past, and he could not afford the luxury of leaving the field. If he left this battle, he lost; Antyre lost. He knew that, saw that, more clearly than perhaps any other, save Gost.

Janus had seen Antyre from gutters to gilt, and spent years in the Itarusine court, learning the measure of Antyre's beloved enemies. For all that confidence though, he felt more and more as if he were a boy shouting at the adult world to pay attention to him.

As Last's son, as Maledicte's lover, he had been someone, someone
scandalous, tinged with danger and the rise to power. With Aris alive, Janus had been a source of wariness in the courtiers and lords who debated his position. But with Aris dead, and so suddenly, the only respect Janus gathered was the respect granted a killer who looked to be escaping the noose.

But who had sent the assassins? Blythe disliked him enough to see him dead, but the fop couldn't suborn a paid whore, much less a member of the Kingsguard. Bull, who owned the guards, was an easy answer; but if Bull wanted Janus dead, his guards would have appeared with trumped-up excuses and a writ of execution. The Duchess of Love or Harm still were the most likely suspects.

Psyke roused all at once; she scrambled from the bed in wary silence at still finding him in her quarters. She disappeared into her dressing room, discreetly tucked behind another narrow drape.

A vase teetered, rocked by her passing, and Janus stilled it, wrinkling his nose at the cut flowers gone rank. In the hallway, two maids spoke in low voices, moving from room to room, bringing fresh water and linens. Janus thrust open the door, startled them to silence, and handed the nearer one the vase. “Dispose of those, and find Dahlia. Her lady is waiting her.”

“Dahlia's ill,” the maid said, her shoulders touching the stone behind her as she stepped back.

“Then find a replacement,” Janus said, and shut the door firmly. Dahlia was hopeless. Dahlia had allowed Psyke to creep out and meet Aris secretly. Too young; too callow; and, worse than both of those, too stupid. Janus despised stupidity; everything else could be taught. Still, it was intriguing. If Dahlia was ill, perhaps Psyke's assertions were more than delusion.

One of the religious tracts had mentioned illnesses accumulating about Haith's avatar, a collective of death. Janus had taken it for hyperbole, but perhaps it was based in truth; his wife surrounded by the dead.

Psyke burst into rapid speech, shrill, a little frightened. “It wasn't my fault, Marchand. My hand on the pistol, but his guidance. And you were hardly blameless. Assassination's a chancy thing, and death can be dealt either direction.” She paused as if listening to a response;
Janus drew in a careful breath, understanding that Psyke thought the shut door had heralded his departure.

His wife talked to herself, spoke sometimes in her sleep; he had known so, but this—this tasted of madness. Or something more. A collective of death? Janus crept closer.

“It's all very well for you to say, but it's still treason. There is, after all, a good deal of difference between proof and punishment. Assassination is not the same as execution, and you know that. You swore an oath to protect. You violated it for a promise of coin from a dubious source, and, worse still—”

Splashes sounded, the quick tide of someone washing her hands and face in jerky movements. “Worse still,” she hissed, “you admit you took money to cloak another assassin in Kingsguard colors, money that might as well have been stamped with the Itarusine glacier. The money, the weapon, the direction … all from that Itarusine agitator whose name is too aptly chosen to be anything but deliberate mockery.”

“Harm, the antimachinist, paid Marchand to kill me?” Janus said, and there came a crash, as if the water basin had been knocked over.

Psyke whirled, pulled the curtain back to gape at him, standing in the dressing room doorway.

“Don't go silent now,” Janus said. “I found your words most illuminating, even if your source is suspect.”

She tilted her chin, drew her water-spattered nightgown about her, and brushed past him. He caught her arm. “Psyke.”

“What would you have me say? That Marchand was so offended by his untimely demise that he came to file a complaint like some petulant customer?” Her tone was offensive, and Janus smiled. So like Mal, cloaking truth with audacity and rudeness. His smile faded—her words cloaked with truth? All her mutterings not madness, but an overheard conversation with the dead?

She turned away, her gown staying put in his hand, sliding away from her skin, baring shoulders gone black.

They were the marks of heavy hands, but no human left marks that grew black, then turned to something other. He touched her left shoulder, traced the long shadow, ridged beneath his fingers, the
rasp of scales. In the tracts Janus had read, a god's touch might manifest so, altering the body of their worshipper. Hadn't Maledicte, at the very end, sprouted feathers, black against his white skin? This looked like more of the same and if so, allowing Psyke to remain his enemy was no longer an option; he needed to win her away from the duchess.

“Why do you praise Aris so?” Janus said, voice rough. An awkward question, but not incendiary, and something he dearly wanted an answer to. “He was a deadly king for this country. Nothing but a fool.”

“As much a fool as you must think me. You will not cozen me,” she said, and he slid his palm over the petals of her lips. Edged pearl flashed, set his fingers dancing away, nursing the tiny hurt where she had bitten. A bead of blood rolled up to the surface of his skin, etched two fingerprints with crimson.

She slowly slipped free from his grasp, scale giving way to sleek skin beneath his fingers. Psyke left the nightgown in his possession, walked away from him, leaving only the warmth of the silk falling through his hands. He cast it aside, and followed her. “You listen to the dead but can't be bothered to listen to me?”

“The dead, at least, are honest,” she said, and while the easy acceptance of his accusation made his stomach clench, he still found a rebuttal for her.

“They can afford it; they are long past the point their enemies can damage them.”

Psyke stepped into a black gown, drew it against her bare skin like any harlot, in that much of a hurry to escape his company. Janus caught the loose tapes at the back, and when she twisted to look at him, merely said, “Dahlia's ill. Again. You might cede to the inevitable. My hands, or wait even longer in my company.”

Janus brought the gown up, covered those hard, rough spots on her shoulders, using the edges of his hand to test the width of the taint.

She sighed, and Janus busied himself with rows of tiny jet buttons, his bitten fingers leaving a few smears of blood on her white back.

“Your beloved Aris,” he said, “allowed the Relicts to molder for generations. What king permits a section of his city to rot, breeding villains, poverty, and plague, and makes no attempt to repair it?”

The tassel of her braided hair, a welter of snarls, scented faintly of blood and powder, brushed the backs of his hands as he worked, stung his face as she swung round to protest his blackening of Aris's character. He pressed a kiss to her mouth, a more civilized way to silence her than a hard hand clamped tight, and turned her back around.