The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,48

back to her family, as did half of her dowry. Our marriage agreement specified she had to live five years or produce a child.”

“Frederick . . .”

“Since the baby died she didn’t count.”

His voice was flat, whether from shock or mute acceptance Giulietta couldn’t tell. Maybe the passing years had numbed his horror. Giulietta suspected it was immature to be shocked – but she felt shocked all the same.

“You know what I found?”

Giulietta shook her head.

“A letter.”

From a lover? She wondered what Frederick was trying to tell her.

“She wrote it the week we married. It was to her cousin in Bohemia.” Frederick shrugged. “They grew up together. She swore her love for him would never die. Said how much she hated being made to marry me. That she would remember him for ever. The day they swam together at the waterfall was the happiest of her life. She never sent it.”

How could he bear to tell her this?

“The priest who was with Annemarie at the end told me she swore she loved me more than she’d ever loved anyone and regretted nothing of her time with me. That she simply wanted me to be happy after she was gone, as she’d been happy during her time with me. So you see . . .”

What? Giulietta wondered.

“We change. We think we don’t but we do.”

They sat in silence after that, not quite touching in the window seat of a corridor that linked the family rooms and acted as a little withdrawing room when the official nature of the palace became too much. He’d remained dry-eyed and his voice had been level when he spoke to her, but she was sure his cheeks looked thinner and his expression a little more withdrawn. He wore a doublet in the northern style, richly decorated with gold thread, and a chain of gold and enamel links hung around his neck that fell to a little ivory dragon with ruby eyes. She wondered if anyone really saw past the clothes to the boy inside.

“I should go,” he said.

“Of course . . .” She stood, embarrassed, wanting to apologise for asking about Annemarie and afraid to make matters worse. So she talked idiocies about the Watch finding it hard to march on ice, and the price of fish now holes had to be cut in the ice, and recut the next day, and how fishermen were complaining they were being turned into sculptors or carpenters.

“Do you have enough food?” he asked suddenly.

She looked up, surprised by his question. “There’s enough to feed an army in the storehouses beyond the kitchens.”

“I meant the city.”

Giulietta flushed with shame. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Maybe your aunt knows. In fact,” he said, “I’m sure she does. We had reports she was buying grain last summer. I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew the cold was coming.” His comment returned her thoughts to what he’d said earlier, about her aunt knowing things other people didn’t, even those with their own spies . . . The more Giulietta thought about it the more she realised it was true. Frederick obviously suspected something. She needed to find out what.

“Why don’t we take a walk on the ice?”

So, Alexa thought, which thread to follow now?

Of course, there were always two threads, do this or do that. Two threads for every single second of every single minute of every life: and there were self-created flaws in those threads, the things you did half well, the things you did intentionally badly, the things you did too early (usually less critical than the things you left too late). Of such was life woven until death stilled the loom.

Those were not the threads Alexa meant, although she knew she was watching her niece wrestle with the simplest of girlish questions. Who do I want to be? Whom do I love? Is it wise? The question troubling Alexa was which thread would keep Venice safest? Tycho’s or Frederick’s.

Sigismund’s bastard had been right.

She’d been buying grain for months. All the same, there would be food riots eventually, because hunger already ate at the poor. But they would arrive later and be less serious than in other cities. Her subjects might not like eating bread when they were used to fish, they might accuse her of having cupboards full of figs and cheese, but the point was, they ate.

Swirling her fingers through the water in her jade bowl, Duchess Alexa gave the two youngsters on the ice back their privacy. Frederick would