Kings and Assassins (2 page)

Though he saw Blythe's choler rise, a hot flush on thin cheeks above the elaborate knots of his cravat, Janus's attention was all for Ivor, watching that tiny quirk of a smile, blossomed and gone, and entirely malevolent. It reminded him of a night spent in the Winter Court in an accommodating lady's boudoir. Janus had raised his gaze from the sweat-damp juncture of Marya's neck and shoulder, her hands still clawing at his back, and found Ivor watching, sleek, still naked from his turn in Marya's embrace. He had reached out, rested his hand on Janus's nape, a warm, possessive touch, even as Janus gave his final attentions to Marya with a shuddering gasp and groan.

The pleasure, Janus knew, wasn't for watching the act itself but at Janus doing something well.

Seeing the same pleased smile on Ivor's face over their shared complicity in Blythe's setdown unsettled his nerves. He felt a ghostly hand touch his skin, the weight of memory. When Ivor was this smug, trouble was sure to follow.

“But three is the ideal number for a game,” Ivor said. He poured Janus another generous measure of brandy; Janus resolved not to drink it.

“If only two are seated,” Ivor continued, “then they must be opponents by default, no matter their inclinations. But three—three allows men to choose alliances as they may.”

“Allows you to work together to lighten my purse, more like,” Blythe muttered. “If you find my smoke, my presence so objectionable, I could think of other places to be, Last. Were I you, and wed
to such a tidy handful as Psyke Bellane, I'd find better pursuits than sitting to games with your fellows.”

Janus sighed, and sipped the brandy more slowly this time. Blythe was an idiot and the comment wasn't worth a reply. His marriage might be a matter of politics instead of passion, but Psyke and he dwelled together respectfully enough. Janus turned his attention back to the pasteboards in his hand, waiting Ivor's turn.

He felt as if he'd been waiting for Ivor to show his hand all evening.

The prince was more than a simple foreign delegate, more even than the newest Itarusine auditor come to ensure the treaty between their two countries was upheld. Ivor might be a loyal son of Itarus, but his ambitions were bigger than playing warden to the Antyrrian finances; Janus had no evidence of it, but in his bones, he felt Ivor had the same prize in mind as himself the Antyrrian throne. But their reasons, Janus thought, were utterly at odds. He knew his own: to see Antyre brought out of the stagnation it had been forced into by the Xipos treaty and by King Aris's neglect.

Ivor's reasons likely centered around his drive for power.

Ivor smiled, and set down a card of his own, the queen of air, Black-Winged Ani, the goddess of love and vengeance; all Janus's musings derailed on a sudden wave of pain and anger.

Maledicte had been gone nearly nine months, borne away by Ani's hatred of cages and Maledicte's own frustration with being locked away at Janus's country estate, a treasonous secret.

Janus set a silver coin, the Antyrrian luna, into the center of the small pile, and laid out his cards. Ivor dropped an Itarusine coin onto the cloth, and fanned his cards with a showman's gesture. A losing hand. One he would have won had he kept the queen of air.

Blythe, annoyed at being ignored, relit his pipe with deliberate emphasis, and said, “I suppose you might shun your wife's company at that, though. It would be all manner of awkward were you to seek her and find her bed already filled. Aris seems quite taken—”

“Aris is our king,” Janus said. He collected his winnings, the pasteboards, tucking Ani's card into the rest as if it meant nothing to him at all. “Respect is owed him.”

“Nicely won, my pet,” Ivor said. “When I recall your first attempts at the game, I grow amazed.”

“There is nothing amazing about progress,” Janus said, more shortly than he had meant, but he grew weary of Ivor's teasing. Instead, he shuffled the cards neatly, dealt them out, noting that Ivor and he had nearly equal piles of coins, even five hands in, while Blythe's had dwindled.

Blythe dragged his chair closer, scattering ash from his clothes onto the velvet, eager for another hand. Janus eyed him and sighed. “What I find far more remarkable is the
failure
to improve.”

“Agreed,” Ivor said. The hand played out, but after the second round of bid and show, Ivor put his palm over the pile when Blythe would have added his coin on the third. “Our round, I think, Blythe. If Janus doesn't hold the suite of high fire, collected entirely from your carelessness, he is not the man I thought him.”

“I suppose you would know,” Blythe said.

Janus eyed the cards in his hands, the red wash of flame in all its guises, and tried to ignore Blythe. His temper, sparked by Ivor's trick with the queen card, was souring by the moment.

Blythe's tone shifted uglier as Ivor shut him out of the game. “I had heard, after all, that most of your games with Ivor were more intimate than this. Perhaps your wife is not the only one to seek companionship outside her marriage; but at least, if she is indiscreet,
she
cannot be considered disloyal to the crown.”

Janus sucked in a furious breath but restrained himself. He was a king's counselor, albeit one in some disgrace, and he had a reputation to uphold. Still, he wanted nothing more than to break his goblet, then use the sharp edge to carve out the man's endlessly offensive tongue.

“Do you intend to provoke him to a duel, Blythe?” Ivor asked. “Do you believe the duchess's support allows you to make such insinuations? I warn you, it does not. Should Janus accept the challenge, I will act his second with pleasure.”

Blythe's hands on the table clenched. There was a brief spurt of panic in his eyes that Janus enjoyed. He had had enough of the lordling's blatant dislike, and the idea of a duel was sweet. It would
be sheer butchery though, no challenge. Edwin Cathcart, Lord Blythe, was a slight young man, prone to talk over action, and even that was clumsy in execution.

Maledicte, Janus thought, would have delighted in destroying him. First, Mal would have shown him what it meant to have a rapier tongue, and then he would have followed it with the blade, until Blythe's flesh was as flayed as his sensibilities.

Janus lowered his head, fighting that sudden sickness in him, the churned grief and anger that Maledicte had fled his side.

“Well, my pet, will you duel?”

Blythe's lips trembled briefly before he regained his confidence. “You wouldn't dare. You might be a counselor, Last, but Aris watches you most carefully. Your behavior must be above reproach.”

Ivor laughed. “I believe he thinks he's confounded you.”

Janus bit one of the coins; the color seemed off, but the gold softened well enough, and he tucked it away. “Blythe, you forget where we are. In this court, in this time, my behavior only need
seem
above reproach.”

Blythe spluttered, but after a moment, finally proved he was capable of learning: He stayed silent, merely tucking his much denuded purse back into his sleeve.

That draft touched Janus's neck again, the sense of movement where there should be none. Janus turned, and be damned to losing whatever unspoken game was between Ivor and himself. Something was happening. Ivor fairly buzzed with it, like the sky before a storm; and faintly, faintly, carried on the drift of smoke, Janus thought he smelled blood, tasted it in the lingering tang of metal in his mouth.

“I need to be going,” Janus said. He rose, and collected his coat, laid aside when the room finally grew warm.

“Stay for another round,” Ivor said. The tone was a command, and Janus bridled under it.

“I think not,” Janus said. “Blythe can continue to amuse you, as he's done so ably all evening. I have morning calls to make, and it's nearer dawn than sundown.” Standing allowed him to see the bedchamber beyond, the source of the drafts and proof of it: One of the ornate bed curtains still wavered, as softly as the tide coming in. But
there was nothing else, no one to see, and nothing at all to explain this knot in his belly, the sense that matters were changing too fast. After years of Maledicte's unpredictable company, when his temper could turn from sweet to murderous within moments, Janus had developed a barometer for the unseen currents beneath events.

“So unfashionable,” Ivor mourned, “and so energetic, also. So unlike your countrymen.”

Ivor was false tonight, Janus realized, playacting the part of the spoiled prince fomenting unrest and spreading dissension. It was a simulacrum of his usual self, a measure of his attention being elsewhere; beneath it, something burned with the careful intensity of a well-laid fire.

A rap on the door distracted them, and Ivor's seneschal, Dmitry, opened it on Ivor's irritable call. “Come in!”

“The Duchess of Love,” Dmitry said, and let Celeste Lovesy sweep into the room. She directed a genteel nod and a polite smile first at Blythe, then at Ivor, but she turned her black-clad back toward Janus, refusing even to glance at him.

Janus felt the weight of her hatred against his skin, and while he wished he had his coat on so he looked more reputable, he cared very little for her scorn. There had been worse directed against him when he was only a child—and an unwanted child at that, a city stray in the slums known as the Relicts.

Blythe, he thought, was a spoiled fool and the duchess was desperate indeed, if he was the caliber of her allies. Given the displeasure on her face at the sight of Blythe's ash-dusted linens, the absence of coin before him, and the temper still bright on his cheek, she might be thinking just that.

“Edwin, your wife is looking for you,” the duchess said. “I doubt she'd be pleased to find you in such company.” A wintry smile for Ivor seemed to say that she didn't mean the prince, of course; all her animus was saved for Janus. “I suggest you tighten your grip on your purse; rats are proven thieves, and this old wing is full of them. Aris is not as decisive as he should be in rooting them out.”

Janus grinned at her. “Our king is tenderhearted indeed. Why else surround himself with useless remnants of a gratefully forgotten
generation?” His gaze skimmed her gloves, heavy with crystals sewn into the fingertips, dangling in a dizzying array of flashing light, emphasizing that this was a lady, and one not accustomed to labor, a style twenty years out of fashion.

As if an antiphon, Ivor drawled lazily, “Tenderhearted enough to leave his throne to a prince born witless and useless.”

If the duchess had swelled with outrage at Janus's words, at Ivor's description of Prince Adiran, she grew so red with rage that Janus said, “Careful, your grace, your husband died of an apoplexy. Surely he'd wish otherwise for you.”

The duchess's first shrill words drowned under the stuttering toll of a deep bell pulled to life by a hand unaccustomed to the task. The duchess silenced herself, and the silence spread out from her, a fragile thing echoing with the possibility of being broken again. The bell rang again, the sound gaining strength. The death bell.

Ivor glanced at the clock on the mantel, frowned, and when he realized Janus was watching him, turned it to a smile. “I wonder what the fuss is about.”

“As do I,” Janus said.

Then Janus was off, out into the hallway and into a near nightmare rush of guards and soldiers, a confusion that was all too reminiscent of the night the palace had been roused to hunt Maledicte down. Though then, at least, the hunt had moved to Janus's plan, whether they knew it or not. This …

Anxiety laced his stomach, turned the brandy sour—this was Ivor's puppetry in action, and there would be blood at the end of it. Any doubts he had that this was Ivor's doing fled when Ivor chose to stay behind. Itarusines were notoriously inquisitive: It kept them alive in their bloodthirsty court. For Ivor to wave him off with a casual hand meant he had no need to see what had happened. He already knew. He stopped a guard, claimed the man's pistol: This was no night to be vulnerable.

In the distance, Prince Adiran's mastiffs howled, urgent, hoarse calls more noticeable in the echoing spaces between the tolls of the slowing death bell. It rang a final time and the dogs fell silent with it. Janus felt the fine hairs on his body stand upright.

Mal
, he thought, on a wild uprush of pleasure. Maledicte had returned, and brought Black-Winged Ani with him, as sulky and reluctant as ever, but caged. Janus knew the sensation of the god's presence as well as he knew the touches of his lover, and the halls were tinged wild with god power. But even as he thought it, his certainty faded. Maledicte was gone, and this was Ivor's game.

The echoes of the shouting soldiers lingered in the halls, hasty confirmations that Aris had slipped, unseen, from his quarters and couldn't be found.

Janus watched a quartet of gray-clad soldiers trot by, pushing past the servants. They headed toward the heart of the palace, the king's residence, and Janus chose the opposite direction, heading for the source of the bell.

The chapel was the first structure to be built by Thomas Redoubt; and history declared that, on completion, the Cold King had chosen to sleep at the feet of the idol of Haith. After his death, the room had fallen from favor, too steeped with the man's chilly presence. Subsequent kings had preferred the city's main cathedral, at least until the gods had taken themselves away.

Janus kept his footsteps quiet on the stone stairs, the borrowed pistol warm in his sweating grip. At the base of the stairs, lights beckoned him onward, the multiple flames of gas lamps lit in a customarily dark hall. As he neared the chapel, neared the susurrus of voices, he saw a fan of blood drops, spattered widely and smeared where a soldier's footsteps had hastened through it.

A sword
, Janus thought,
and an old one
. Not the narrow rapiers now popular in the court, but a thick, wide blade with a heavy hilt that trapped gore and spread it. A blade like that was common in Itarus, where the cold made thinner weapons brittle. He had one himself, having been trained in swordplay abroad.

A woman's gasping breath caught his attention, a hiccup of sound that might be a voice giving in to tears or hysteria. He stepped into the doorway, saw Captain Rue of the Kingsguard turn to face him, eyes widening. “Last.”