The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,61
can make men of . . .” He didn’t dare finish his sentence.
“He was brilliant as a child, my aunt said.”
Captain Weimer nodded, and Giulietta left him pondering as she hurried after Marco, who was in a corridor below ordering braziers be lit in the council room and letters sent to other princes informing them his mother was dead. She wondered how Marco expected the letters to be carried in his weather and realised he regarded this as a problem for the head of his messenger service. Mostly she wondered how he could be so calm.
You’re not a child. You’re not a child. She repeated the words every time she felt tears. She would not cry into front of all of these people. But a life without Aunt Alexa . . .
“Follow me,” Marco said.
Giulietta obeyed without question.
Three guards stood in a side room, with Tycho’s page hunched on a seat with her aunt’s lizard on his lap. The boy looked frozen with horror and the guards nervous. The dragonet merely glared balefully. “So,” Marco said to the senior guard. “Tell me again why you weren’t guarding my m-mother’s door.”
“She dismissed us, your highness.”
“Dismissed you?”
“The duchess ordered us to leave. She said that if we were questioned about this we were to say it was her direct command.”
“If you were questioned . . .?”
“Yes, highness.”
Marco considered the point, and Giulietta watched him assess the man who spoke. Typically Venetian, with curling black hair, and the strong nose and full lips seen mostly in the west of the city. He looked Castellano and his accent confirmed it. He would have a family, wife and children. He would have been chosen carefully and had no reason to lie. If he said Aunt Alexa dismissed him . . .
“And then?”
“I heard the duchess scream murder . . .”
Giulietta dug her nails into her hands. How could Marco bear this? She wanted to vomit, and he just stood there impassively. Like a prince, she thought. Like his mother. He watched, considered and listened the way Alexa said a prince should behave. The way Giulietta had never been able to behave herself.
“So you d-disobeyed her order to stay away?”
The guard obviously hadn’t thought of it that way.
“I would have d-done the same,” Marco said.
Relief flooded the man’s face and those either side of him relaxed slightly. “The door was locked, highness. So we broke it down, we were desperate.” There was truth to his words, and he moved carefully, like a man who’d bruised his shoulder. One of the others had cuts on his hands.
“Go on.” Marco said. “Spare no d-detail.”
The man swallowed. “The duchess was on the floor, dead already. There was blood all around her, and her hand . . .” He hesitated. “He was hacking off her ring finger with a knife.”
Marco raised his hand to silence her. “There are three of you. Why d-didn’t you arrest him?”
“Highness, he threw himself through the window.”
“It’s three floors up. He’d have b-broken something.”
The man Marco spoke to glanced at Giulietta, whose throat soured. No, she thought. No . . . She knew instantly what he wanted to say, opened her mouth to stop him from saying it and shook her head.
“Highness.” The man gulped. “It was Lord Tycho.”
“That’s not true.” Giulietta knew her voice was loud. “Make him take it back. Tycho would never . . .” She grabbed her cousin’s arm. “You must believe me. The man’s lying. He has it wrong. It was someone disguised as Tycho.”
“Who survived a d-drop from a third-floor window?”
“Magic,” Giulietta insisted. “Someone made to look like him and given his . . . powers. He’s in Montenegro. How could he possibly be here?”
“My love . . .”
“It can’t be him.” She sounded desperate, even to herself.
“My lady . . .” Pietro, Tycho’s page, stood with Aunt Alexa’s winged lizard in his arms like an ungainly cat.
“What are you doing with dracul?”
“He’s mine.” Pietro took a breath. “I mean, the duchess said I was to have him. That he was mine now.” Pietro rested his head against the dragonet’s forehead and his expression when he lifted his head away was bleak. He looked as sick as she felt. “My master did this.” His words were a whisper. “It was him.”
“Pietro . . .”
“Why would he do this?”
“Return to your d-duties,” Duke Marco told the guards.
Giulietta wanted to accuse the boy of lying. Ask him how he dared betray the man who freed