The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,77

reason for what he’d done. He’d been the first to worm his way into her heart; made her want him and offered to protect her and become a father to Leo. And then what happened? He left when she begged him to stay, offering his loyalty to the man who . . . She couldn’t even bear to finish that thought.

Even worse than this he had returned to kill Aunt Alexa. And now Frederick – who was meant to be her friend – had not only tricked her into friendship, but also destroyed what little hope she had left. Lord Bribanzo had died with two scrolls in his belt. One said Frederick was here on the orders of his father. The other that Maria Dolphini had given birth to a child. Alonzo had a son, an heir to take his name and follow after him. Bribanzo was to challenge Giulietta on whether she believed the child was Alonzo’s . . .

Of course it was. He’d stolen Leo and was passing him off as Maria’s child. The second part of Alonzo’s challenge was more brutal still. He stated his belief that the boy in the nursery upstairs, where she could hardly bear to go, was an impostor, which he was. And that a dead infant answering Leo’s description was hidden in the crypt of the basilica, which it was. He challenged her, on oath, to say that he lied.

Her uncle had won.

When the Council heard the news they would replace her and Alonzo would sail home with Tycho at his side. Frederick would abandon her. Not that he’d ever really loved her. She’d be back to who she always was. Someone’s cousin, someone’s niece, someone’s plaything. A thought so horrific occurred to her that she nearly pissed herself. What if Alonzo had promised her to Tycho? What if she got the marriage she’d once wanted to a man who betrayed her at the command of a man who’d done worse? She would never forgive what her uncle had done the night an abbess and a hedge witch held her down so Dr Crow could impregnate her on his orders.

She loved Leo, but the nature of his getting tortured her.

Walking to the door, Lady Giulietta shouted for a messenger and sent him for the new master of the Assassini, an anonymous man who’d returned a month earlier from Vienna to find his city changed. He was master because Giulietta had stripped Tycho of that title. She waited impatiently for his arrival.

“My lady?”

“Find a hedge witch called Mistress Scarlet and the Abbess of San Loyola, kill them both before nightfall, bring me proof . . .”

He risked a glance and bowed.

The door shut behind him with a whisper and it was done. She’d condemned two people to death. Lady Giulietta would have made it three but doubted he’d obey. Asking the master of the Assassini to add her to his list might be an order too far.

Aunt Alexa’s poisons chest sat beside Giulietta’s desk, as it had sat beside that desk from the time Alexa first arrived in the city as a child and asked for a room of her own. No servant had dared move it or even dust it. A thin film covered its surface, except for two patches where Giulietta had taken to using it as a footstool.

The saddest thing about the study for Giulietta was not that Aunt Alexa had died here, it was her aunt’s dead pots of flowers and withered bushes. Alexa grew them to provide fruit for her giant bat, Nero, which would eat nothing else, coming from Egypt where that was what bats ate. After Nero died, Alexa kept the plants alive anyway, having braziers brought in day and night to keep them warm when the snows came. With her death the braziers stopped being brought and the plants died. There was probably a lesson in that somewhere.

Pulling back her scissor chair, Giulietta sat at her desk, found a sheet of velum and a quill and reached for the ink with shaking hands. When she discovered the ink was dry she gave up all thought of writing a note. What would she have said anyway?

The bottle was one of the smallest. Dracul’s tears read its label.

A crude glass vial with a cork stopper sealed with wax. Her aunt had medicines arranged by potency and it had taken Giulietta a while to work out the meaning of the coloured waxes sealing her poisons. Red meant death.