The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini (28 page)

She shrugged. “This form you took, this world to which you exiled yourself . . . What were you looking for that you became this?”

Tycho thought back to his memories of the beginning, which was not really his beginning, any more than he was the
you
she addressed. He thought of the warring gods and the battle for heaven, and had his answer. Some had fallen and some had not, and some had ended here. His mother had crossed half the world looking for it. Maybe her father had done the same, and his father, and so on.

“Forgiveness,” Tycho said.

When he woke he was curled on the mossy floor of the cave with Leo asleep in his arms. He would have liked to dismiss his dreams, but Leo was healthy and bright-eyed, and Tycho could feel hot tears on his own cheeks. In his hands was the grave ribbon from Giulietta’s hair.

Lady Giulietta refused to allow her ladies-in-waiting their miracle. She’d fallen into a fever and the doctor who thought her dead was wrong . . . She’d allow him his life as an act of charity but he was banished from Venice on the understanding he spoke to no one about this and never returned. Her aunt would have killed the man. That was Alexa. She was her own person.

“Fetch back the chamberlain, tell Marco’s physician I’ll be visiting Marco later, so no sedatives, and send Prince Frederick a message asking him to visit at his earliest convenience . . .” Her lady-in-waiting curtsied and withdrew without daring to look Lady Giulietta in the face. None of them dared look her in the face they were all so certain she’d returned from the dead. It would wear off. Well, either it would wear off or she’d replace the lot of them. The missing hair ribbon was a puzzle, though.

They’d found her alive but still in deepest sleep.

She’d told the chamberlain someone had obviously stolen the ribbon from her hair. He’d have been more likely to believe her had the door of the great chamber not been locked after Frederick left. Alexa would have known what to say.

Chances were Marco would know, too.

“A sweet angel t-took your r-ribbon.”

She’d barely made it through his door when he answered the question she’d yet to ask. Behind her, two guards stiffened and she knew they were listening and were too shocked to hide the fact.

“Tell me t-that isn’t t-true?” Marco was smiling, and his eyes flicked beyond her shoulder to the guards. “A b-beautiful angel t-took your ribbon and k-kissed you on the brow and s-said, God himself was r-returning you to h-health . . .”

“You can go,” Lady Giulietta told the guards.

As the door shut, Marco grinned. “So much b-better than talk of d-demons. Within half an h-hour the whole city will k-know an angel came to earth to m-mop your brow and still your f-fever. And took only a h-hair ribbon as his r-reward. How sweet is t-that . . .”

“
Marco . . .
”

“Allow them their little m-miracle and they’ll stop l-looking for a big one.” He smiled at her. “P-people have been t-talking about n-nothing else all morning. I knew you’d be c-coming to see m-me.” Marco patted the seat beside him, as if she had reverted to being a child. Instead of how it really was back then – her always seeming older and him seeming little more than a fool.

“Now, the p-poison. Tell me why you d-did something that s-stupid.”

By noon, everyone in the city knew that prayer, God and Lady Giulietta’s innate virtue had saved her from the severest of fevers, and that Lord Bribanzo’s death, until lately thought a robbery gone wrong, had been at the hands of the Assassini on the orders of Duke Marco himself. The duke having firm proof that Bribanzo had turned traitor. Almost as bad, he’d been funding the ex-Regent, who had allied himself with the Red Crucifers and was threatening Venice.

The rumour that an angel mopped Giulietta’s brow and healed her with a kiss lost ground to the wonder of Duke Marco appearing in public on the Piazza San Marco, in control of his twitching and so poised that he talked to shocked onlookers with almost no stuttering at all. It was widely agreed the Millioni were blessed.

When Prince Frederick presented himself at the Porta della Carta, his entire entourage behind him and all wearing breastplates, the rumours really started. Venice was allying itself with Sigismund. The prince was engaged to Giulietta. He brought demands from his father. She’d called him to banish him.

The truth never made it to the streets. He came to apologise and tell her he was leaving Venice. He didn’t even get a quarter of a way through his apology before she told him to shut up and stop being so bloody formal. Their friendship returned more or less to normal after that; which meant he remained embarrassed and occasionally tongue-tied, and she tried not to tease him too much.

“I thought . . .” He hesitated. “I thought you’d want me to go. I should have said my father sent me. I should have told you m . . .” His hesitation this time was even longer. “I should have told you many things.”

“You did,” Giulietta said.

He looked happier but no less puzzled.

Rumour mongers visited taverns and rookeries to trim the gossip according to Marco’s orders, which reached the rumour mongers through so many levels of secret whispers that few realised where they originated. Venice was not allying with Sigismund (which would cause problems with Byzantium). However, Lady Giulietta and Prince Frederick were firm friends. After the tragic death of his wife and child, even Emperor Sigismund would be glad the boy was coming out of himself.

No one talked of Alexa’s will because few knew of it and those who did were too shocked to mention it elsewhere. Pietro produced it, still tied with a ribbon and sealed with Alexa’s own seal. He’d brought it to the map room where Marco, Lady Giulietta and Frederick were peering at a fresco of the countries bordering the Adriatic Sea. Marco had just said something.

“The elder goddess cleft?” Frederick asked.

Lady Giulietta blushed.

“The world’s cunt,” said Marco. He looked at his cousin. “That’s what it’s called. That’s what everyone calls it.”

“You know where it is?”

He smiled, pulling a small book from the shelves. He was about to open it when he noticed Pietro in the doorway. “Your page,” he said.

“I don’t have a . . .” Giulietta stopped.

Pietro bowed clumsily. At least half his clumsiness was because he didn’t want to dislodge the dragonet draped around his neck. Given the sharpness of the little lizard’s claws and the tenacity with which it clung that was a wise move. “The duchess told me to give you this.”

“What is it?” Frederick demanded.

Pietro shrugged, realised that was rude and muttered, “Don’t know, sir.”

Lady Giulietta waved the boy into the room. “Did she say when you were to give it to us?”

“
Sometime later
,” Pietro said.

Marco laughed loudly. “S-so like her.” He took the scroll and raised his eyebrows at the seal. It had Chinese characters inside a square. At least Giulietta thought that’s what they were. She wondered why Marco didn’t banish Pietro and wondered if she should do it herself. The question was answered when Marco ordered the page to sit quietly in the corner with his dragonet.

“It’s h-hungry?” Marco asked.

“It’s always hungry, sir.”

Marco laughed. Returning to the scroll, he freed its ribbon and unrolled the parchment, his eyes skimming line after line of his mother’s writing. At the end of it, he sighed. “She was r-rich in her own r-right, I should have realised . . . All those opportunities to influence my f-father, all those d-decisions to be made in Council when she was co-R-Regent. And my f-father gave her land when they m-married.”

“It concerns personal matters?” Frederick was asking if he should go. Giulietta noticed him chew his lip as he waited for her cousin to reply.

“Nothing my m-mother did was p-purely personal.”

Frederick nodded.

“She leaves m-money to me. That lizard and the r-rank of armiger to the b-boy. She leaves Giulietta a m-mansion in Corte di M-Mmillioni, plus its contents. A h-house I d-didn’t even know she owned. She leaves L-Leo vineyards on the m-mainland. You, she leaves her h-horses.”

“Me?” Frederick said.

“A s-stud south of Milan. She thinks you’ll l-like it . . .” Marco hesitated. “Tycho becomes a c-count, and gets her silver m-mines in M-Montenegro. She thinks h-he’ll appreciate the irony.” Frederick looked at Giulietta, who looked at the floor.

“When did she give you this?” Marco demanded.

“The night she was . . . The night she . . .”

“G-gave you the dragonet?” The duke realised the boy didn’t know that Tycho, who had been his old master, was acting on orders. Abandoning the book he’d taken from the shelves, Marco went to crouch in front of the boy. They spoke quietly and Pietro’s face changed as Giulietta watched. By the end he was wide-eyed and wondering, half in tears and half smiling as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his thin shoulders, which it had.

How did her cousin know how to do that?

“So,” Marco said. “We can t-take it she wrote this k-knowing she was going to d-die. It r-really is her last will. H-her expression of intent.” He lowered his voice, and Giulietta realised he was trying to avoid being overheard by Pietro.

“She wants Alonzo d-dead.”

“I should leave,” Frederick said.

“N-no,” said Marco, “you should s-stay. Alonzo has signed a t-treaty with Byzantium agreeing an alliance once he t-takes my throne. This is their emperor’s revenge for Tycho k-killing his son.”

“Rosalyn killed Nikolaos,” Giulietta said flatly.

“Did s-she?” Marco looked surprised.

Frederick nodded. “I was there. The wild girl killed Prince Nikolaos and Tycho killed Lord Andronikos . . . So, this means war?”

Marco shrugged. “What other choice do we have?”

A declaration of war concentrates the mind. So it’s said.

Well . . . So Marco insisted it was said. Lady Giulietta was less sure. It certainly changed the city’s view of Marco, though. Those who’d cursed her cousin’s name a week earlier vied with each other to be the most patriotic. Within an hour of the war against Alonzo being announced the first drunk had been arrested for celebrating too hard, and a street fight between the Nicoletti and the Castellani had to be broken up, after both gangs accused each other of supporting the traitorous Alonzo and lacking true faith in Marco the Great.

That all it took to have
the Simple
replaced with
the Great
was go to war with his own uncle, Marco professed to find amusing. If he’d known it was that easy, he told Giulietta, he’d have done it years ago. She knew this was a lie, but Frederick grinned at the truth of it. And they all took a turn around the Piazza San Marco so the gathering crowds could see what they’d be fighting for.

In the fever of the city’s drunken self-regard, Marco being half-Mongol suddenly became unimportant and his decision to go to war in the middle of the coldest winter anyone could remember hailed as brilliance. When, Giulietta thought, it was probably the most stupid thing he’d done – for all she couldn’t see an alternative.

The city’s joy was helped by a final emptying of grain from the state granaries and the release of barrels of salt mutton and thin beer from Frederick’s own warehouses. So much of all three flooded the market that prices plummeted to the point where even poor households could afford to store food. Parties started up on the Grand Canal and skates – consigned to cupboards – broken out again as the poor, the
cittadini
and the noble mixed on the ice.

Marco asked for and received volunteers in their thousands. Men with military experience were separated from those without. The toughest of the Nicoletti and Castellani street thugs were corralled into auxiliary bands and put under the command of seasoned sergeants. The state armoury was opened; swords, helmets, straw-stuffed leather jerkins and breastplates issued, each one imprinted with the X-strike of the Council of Ten.

Names were entered on lists, and lists of companies collected into a roster that was presented to Marco himself. The duke would be leading his army. Some of the city’s earliest dukes had fought in battle. None of them had been stuttering simpletons, although at least one had been blind and another crippled. In recent years the Millioni had relied on mercenaries for their foreign campaigns.

Marco intended to change that.

His war galleys were still anchored off the edge of the lagoon, where the ice could not close around their wooden hulls and crush them. Some of the fleet had been rowed from Arzanale through cracking ice at the start of the freeze, when Duchess Alexa realised how fierce the cold was going to be. Half the City Watch, most of the palace guard and all the customs men had volunteered for battle. Marco told his commanders to accept all recruits.

When it was suggested – gently and politely – that this would leave his city open to disorder, he’d pointed out there was no trade for the customs to tax, and anyone worth murdering would be elsewhere. All the same, he issued a proclamation stating that disorder in time of war was treason, punishable by death, and his law would be strictly enforced. No one dared ask who’d be enforcing this. Since the city guard had all volunteered.

His points made, Marco made Roderigo’s replacement as Captain of the Dogana his infantry commander, gave Captain Weimer, the new captain of the palace guard, control of the cavalry, and appointed two Watch captains as their lieutenants. The only serious argument happened in private, out of sight of the Council and the new commanders. Before it happened, Frederick gave Giulietta a present, although the argument was not between Frederick and Giulietta, but between Giulietta and her cousin, the duke.

She was shocked at how certain Marco was of his rights as duke. He was shocked at her declaration of independence from Venice and her statement that as a zum Friedland princess and landowner in Schiavoni she reserved the right to think for herself. For a moment, with Marco refusing to back down and Giulietta refusing to relinquish power as Regent, it looked as if the war might not happen.

But first, of course, Frederick had to give Giulietta her present.