The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,91

face torn between fear and duty. He froze, obviously shocked. Whether at her in armour, the fact she was wearing only her undergown, or that she held a sword was harder to tell. “Sorry,” Giulietta said. “I’m having a lesson.”

“My lady, I’m so sorry. I didn’t . . .”

“Of course you didn’t.” She waved him and his apology from her room. “We’d better practise elsewhere,” she told Frederick.

“We’ll practise on board.” He appeared serious.

“Frederick, Marco will never . . .”

“Demand it. You’re still the Regent, remember? Why do you think I had this made for you? I don’t expect you to fight,” he added hurriedly. “But you should have armour and I thought white would suit you.”

Lady Giulietta put down her sword and let him unbuckle her armour, his fingers touching her side as he removed the metal skirt scalloping her hips. She blushed and he seemed not to notice. “I’m your squire,” he said, putting the armour back into its boxes. The last to be packed was her open-faced helmet.

“People need to see you.”

She wasn’t sure if he was making a general point or meant Marco’s followers needed to see her face. It turned out he meant the second. He had an idea for refining why Venice was going to war. It involved telling the truth. At least, a version of the truth closer to the real truth than the one currently being told. Having spent her life surrounded by those who dealt in lies and half-lies and held the truth close like hidden cards, she liked it. She liked it very much indeed. For a start, it meant she’d have the changeling in the nursery quietly fostered and forgotten. Only a few knew Alexa had put the nursemaid’s infant in the slaughtered child’s place, and they would keep silent.

Calling for a messenger, Lady Giulietta dictated a proclamation that ignored the dead baby put in Leo’s place and simplified what had happened to something the city could understand and accept. The traitor Alonzo had stolen Leo, her son and Venice’s heir. The army of Venice was going to get him back.

By nightfall, those who hadn’t already enlisted were thronging the Piazza San Marco demanding that they too be allowed to fight. No man between fourteen and sixty saw why he should be left behind. Marco was furious about the proclamation, but there was little he could do. He tried to tell Giulietta she couldn’t come. Giulietta replied that she was Regent; without her permission he couldn’t go at all. His going depended on her going. Leo was hers. She would go.

Giulietta won.

38

And on the other side of the Adriatic Sea, in a strange fort built into the head of a high valley, the infant they argued about slept in a stronghold doorway, wrapped in rancid furs, while the man neither Giulietta nor Marco mentioned hacked the heads from dead archers and spiked them on spears arranged in a row. Their bodies he dragged through the stronghold and up stone steps to leave at the mouth of a cave – in case those who lived inside could use them. The weather was so cold that neither the bodies nor their glassy-eyed heads rotted.

Roderigo’s corpse he impaled for his part on the night Tycho was captured in a silver net on Duchess Alexa’s orders. Under the tallow light of a cruel moon, he put Roderigo right in the middle of the line he’d arranged as a warning to anyone foolish enough to approach the walls. And as he wrestled the spear upright, and dropped its end into the hole he’d stabbed and twisted into frozen earth, he considered what the creature in the cave had said. It could all be lies, of course. Even that strange almost-memory of angels fighting and falling could be a lie. Perhaps he simply wanted it to be untrue . . .

Although those in the cave left him untouched, he knew they watched, unless that was the elder goddess herself. Tycho suspected she was too old and too powerful to bother with lesser immortals any more.

Leo was walking now.

That was new. At least, he thought it was. He hadn’t paid the infant much attention except as an extension of Giulietta but he was pretty certain the walking was new and hoped she’d be pleased. He knew she would pass this way soon. He’d told her where he was and that he had Leo. If she didn’t come for him she’d come for the child. He was