The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini (11 page)

She tried, she really tried. Perhaps it was the drugs, perhaps she simply wasn’t as clever as Marco. That was more likely. Giulietta was coming to realise there were few people as clever as Marco. He was so clever most people thought him a fool. “I give up,” she said.

“One of the kitchen maids is pregnant.”

Alexa went still, and then let the breath from her body when her son shook his head, slightly mockingly. His smile said he’d shown little interest in women so far, surely she didn’t expect him to change now? The disappointment showed on Alexa’s face and Giulietta felt sorry for her.

“How do you know she’s pregnant?”

“I asked.”

This left unanswered what Marco was doing talking to kitchen maids, but since he was duke, and Alonzo was gone, there was little to stop him from wandering where he liked and talking to whom he liked. Besides, the kitchens were warm, so spending time there probably counted as sensible.

“So is Antonio’s wife,” Marco added.

“Who’s Antonio?”

“The young guard on the Council stairs, the one with the fair hair.”

Lady Giulietta had barely registered that there was a new guard, never mind learnt his name, noticed his hair or discovered his wife was pregnant. She imagined there was a purpose to Marco’s words and he’d reach it soon.

“Think about it,” Marco said impatiently. “Are there midwives in heaven? Will some women in heaven be pregnant for eternity? Are there going to be births, and babies and breast-feeding and nappies? We’ll know the world’s going to end when women stop getting pregnant.”

“Who told you that?” Alexa demanded.

“Worked it out for myself.” Marco rewarded himself by raising the leather flap over the side window and sticking his head into the wind like a dog on a barge. The crowds on both banks erupted with excitement and Alexa stopped trying to pull him back inside again.

“He’s changing,” Giulietta risked saying.

“You’ve noticed it too?” The duchess’s gaze sharpened.

Giulietta wondered what Aunt Alexa would do if she discovered her son’s idiocy was a disguise adopted in childhood to protect him from Alonzo, her brother-in-law. Would she blame Uncle Alonzo? Would she decide it was her own fault? Or would she take it out on those who already knew this? Lady Giulietta had no intention of being the one to find out. Only, the question she did ask earned her such a glare she might as well have talked about Marco anyway. All she did was wonder aloud how her aunt knew about Prince Frederick’s arrival.

“Which one is he?” Lady Giulietta demanded.

Aunt Alexa looked at her.

“We’ve never met. Remember?” Giulietta didn’t want to revisit the night her lady-in-waiting was killed by an arrow meant for this boy, the night Marco revealed to her that he wasn’t the idiot prince his subjects thought. She scanned Germans and saw a large, broad-shouldered young man in a wolf-fur coat looking entirely too pleased with himself. “That one?”

“No,” Alexa said. “Over there.”

A narrow-shouldered youth was climbing from the last coach and looking nervously around him. He stamped the ice as if three carriages, five horses and a dozen people weren’t test enough of its strength. Turning, he noticed Lady Giulietta staring and hesitated. She watched him force himself to approach – and somewhere in the handful of steps between his carriage and where she stood his face changed, losing its nervousness and filling with a terrible sadness.

He stopped, and reached for her hand. Lady Giulietta expected him to kiss it, but he simply held it for a few seconds longer than he should then let it go. He looked as if he wanted to hug her and didn’t quite dare. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Really sorry. I know how it feels.”

“Your highness?”

“To lose a child . . .”

He should be paying his respects to Duke Marco, or kissing Aunt Alexa’s hand, but his eyes were for her and they were brown, intense and bright as cut agate. His face was raw with sadness.

“Who said anything about a child?” Giulietta demanded.

“Our spies say Leo is dead and a substitute takes his place.” The boy looked beyond Giulietta to the scowling duchess. “At least, until your aunt decides her next move. It must be brutal having to pretend.” His beautiful brown eyes filled with tears. “
Prince Frederick . . .
” The Duchess Alexa stepped forward.

“I was married,” Frederick said simply. Maybe he read Giulietta’s thoughts that said he was too young to have lost a wife and child. No one had told her this when he was mentioned as one of her suitors. “Your wife died in childbirth?”

“Plague.” The prince gulped and Giulietta realised how much it hurt him to talk of it. “I was thirteen and she was fifteen. My father wanted to cement an alliance and . . .”

Yes, Giulietta knew how that worked.

“Annemarie,” Frederick said. “We fell in love.” His shrug said stranger things had happened. “And she had a child a year after we married.”

“A boy?”

“A girl. While I was on campaign, plague swept the castle and both died . . .” This time he did reach for her, although it was to grip her shoulders rather than hug her. “So I know what it feels like. I’m sorry.”

“When did this happen?”

“Four years ago.”

Four years?
Lady Giulietta thought about that. Four years and Frederick was
still
mourning the loss of his wife from an arranged marriage and a child who wasn’t even a boy? Behind her, someone stepped forward.

“T-these are d-deep matters.”

“I’m sorry . . . I should have . . .”

Duke Marco waved away the young prince’s apology. “If I w-was you, I’d h-have wanted to talk to her first, t-too. But you’d better . . .” He smiled and pointed to his mother, who accepted Prince Frederick’s bow with a thoughtful expression.

“You understand,” she said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about?”

“Of course.” The prince bowed again to show he did.

“So . . . Accepting that. You came all this way to tell my niece how sorry you were for this thing that we don’t accept has happened?”

Prince Frederick hesitated. “I wanted to tell her how sorry I was. That I knew how much it hurts to lose a child. Also, we never got a chance to meet.”

“You thought you might try wooing her again?”

The prince looked shocked. “Oh no,” he said. “I know she’s going to marry Lord Tycho. All Europe knows.” He meant the thin sliver of the nobility who cared about such matters.

“But it doesn’t hurt to be seen trying?”

He blushed, looked behind him to check his courtiers weren’t listening. “It gave me an excuse to leave court. I’m still in disgrace, you know. Although not as much as I could be. Since I returned something my father wanted.”

“The
WolfeSelle
.”

His shocked expression made Giulietta smile.

“One of the worst kept secrets in the city,” Alexa said tartly.

The
WolfeSelle
was the
krieghund
’s totem, an ancient sword revered by the Wolf Brothers and wielded by their leader. It seemed absurd that this should be the shy young man standing in front of Giulietta, but she’d seen him fight in wolf form that night on Giudecca, when Tycho offered to return the
WolfeSelle
if the
krieghund
would join him in rescuing her. They’d fought and mostly died, and Tycho kept his word, returning the blade to the Assassini’s oldest enemy. “You were saying,” Duchess Alexa murmured. “About being in disgrace?”

“Out of favour might be more accurate. My father is busy besieging heretics in Bohemia. Life on campaign is . . .” Frederick hesitated. “Less fun than it might be. So I thought . . . And I did want to say how sorry I was.” His smile faded at the mention of Giulietta’s dead child.

Lady Giulietta wondered if she should tell him Leo was still alive.

In the hours that followed, Prince Frederick and his small court settled themselves at the Fontego dei Tedeschi, his father’s warehouse just below the Rialto Bridge. Rooms were cleared and stables found for the horses. The land on which the warehouse stood was German, according to the rules governing
fondaci
. The land was German and so were the laws applied inside. By the time night fell – which was early, this being the start of winter – Frederick had made the rounds of his men, checking they were housed properly and settled into their chambers.

The last thing Frederick did before retiring was send for one of his men and give him a message for his father. Frederick had let Alexa believe he was here without the emperor’s blessing. In fact, he had left court with permission. It was time to make his first report.

“Yes, highness . . .” The man bowed low.

Standing at the window a few minutes later, Frederick watched a young wolf skulk out on to the ice of the Canalasso and disappear into the night. The journey across the snows would be brutal, but his message would arrive. If anyone could clear the distance and arrive safely it was them. They were
krieghund
.

In the same hour, on the far side of the Adriatic Sea, which glittered with white crests on black waves, halfway into a range of mountains that rose for ever, the man named earlier as Lady Giulietta’s next husband scowled at the crude walls of that night’s shelter and thought about Venice not at all. Tycho was too cold and too hungry and too worried to think about anything other than the yard in which he stood.

The map Marco had provided was crude, but the fort was on it and had always been marked as one of their stops. Everything about the place felt wrong, starting with its shape, which was a quarter-circle of grey stone, built across the narrow head of the valley, with rising cliffs and a slit cave behind. At first Tycho thought the fort must protect a silver mine because what else in this godforsaken country would need protecting? Only the arrow slits faced in both directions, down the valley and into this tiny yard behind. No force big enough to trouble a fort could gather here so why did the arrow slits exist? The other reason the cave couldn’t be a silver mine was that the track marks where sleds had been dragged from underground were missing.

The heaviest wall was on this side rather than facing into the valley. The door on the valley side was thick, but the door to the yard thicker still and fat-hinged, with a steel plate set into it through which three dozen arrows could be fired simultaneously from a three-stringed porcupine.

The layout made so little sense that Tycho began to explore. Under the roof a dormitory full of abandoned bedrolls, saddles and curved sabres showed that cavalry had manned the fort until recently. At ground level the empty cupboards in the kitchen showed they’d taken any food with them. And they’d obviously left in a hurry because a half-cooked but now frozen deer carcase rested on an iron spit above a cold fire pit. In the yard someone had killed a horse and flensed its carcase, cutting all the flesh from its bones. Tycho could imagine how hungry cavalry would have to be before they ate their mounts.

A well in the cellar held water sealed with ice that clattered three seconds after Tycho dropped a stone. His second stone was larger, broke the ice and brought Amelia running . . . “Found anything?” she asked.

Tycho shook his head. “You?”

“Well, maybe . . .” she admitted. Amelia was wrapped in furs that stank even in the cold, unless the stink was her and that was possible. “There’s burnt-out mage powder on the armoury floor.”

That begged two questions. How Amelia recognised mage powder, because he didn’t think he would. And what the hell it was doing in a crumbling fort in the pits of nowhere. Mage powder was a mix made by alchemists that burnt so hot it cut steel and so fiercely water couldn’t put it out.

“How much?”

Pinching her finger and thumb together, Amelia looked cross when he snorted. “There’s also an empty barrel.”

The barrel was small, and had been stored inside a bigger one filled with sand. The sides of both were varnished and their bottoms and lids sealed with slugs of tar that took the imprint of Tycho’s thumb. Whoever stored the powder had been determined to stop air from getting in and setting it alight. It might take a minute or so before the grains of phosphor sparked, but once the mix was ignited it would be unstoppable. So why had it been opened and emptied?

Pushing open the rear door, Tycho stepped into the small, rocky yard formed by the fort closing off the very head of the valley. Icy slopes rose on both sides and where they joined the slit cave showed dark and daunting. Tycho knew instantly what the soldiers had used the powder for. Flame marks darkened the underside of a cracked ledge high above. Mage powder made a poor explosive, but they’d still tried, and failed, to close the cave.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s see what they intended to hide.”

“No.” Amelia grabbed his arm, letting go when he swung round to face her. He expected her to step back but she stood there shaking her head. The woman was Assassini trained, as fast as him and almost as deadly. He thought for a moment that she might be joking, her humour being somewhat strange, but she seemed serious.

“We have no business here.”

What has that to do with anything?
By definition the
Assassini
went where they had no business. The shadows embraced them and in turn the
Assassini
embraced the shadows. He was simply the logical conclusion to that. A man so in love with darkness he couldn’t stand the light. Tycho stopped, shocked by the unexpected insight.
Where had that come from?

“Gods,” he said. “I’ll search it myself later.”

If he read the fallen rubble right the vanished soldiers had tried to cause a rockslide that would bury the slit cave, but failed. They’d risked handling mage powder, but been too frightened or in too great a hurry to try again and had abandoned a second barrel inside the rear door. The fort’s layout finally made sense to him. It was built to protect the valley from whatever was in the cave, not the other way round. Whatever was in there probably knew Tycho and Amelia were here. All the same, he saw no point in attracting attention.

“No fires,” he said.

Amelia glared at him. “We’ll freeze.”