The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,120

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