Kings and Assassins (40 page)

Janus's breath came faster, fed by the desire to defeat Ivor in even this littlest of fashions. “Do you think man is such a poor creature as to hold but one thought at a time? Do you think I am so simple?” Janus drove forward, blade angling in from the side, and had the brief satisfaction of watching Ivor's blade slowed for a moment. Then Ivor batted his blade away with the irritated languor of a great cat.

“You don't listen. Let me explain it again,” Ivor said. “A man's wants are often contrary and force compromise. And a compromised dream is bitter.”

“And your dream is simpler?” Janus growled. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want my throne,” Ivor said, slamming his blade forward, his considerable body weight behind it. Janus raised his blade in time to take the force on his shoulder, though he slid backward under the power of it. “And I want it
now.”

They traded fast slashes at and about each other, stirring the air, and creating a current of steel scent and sweat laced with blood. The
stitches in Janus's arm gave, the seam of his flesh going slack beneath the bandages.

Another round of thrust and slash and Janus's blood made a tiny, first foray to slick the grass with crimson. The guards tensed. Their pistols came out again.

Time ran away from them. Soon, a guard would shoot, and that single guard's control over a notoriously awkward weapon would send them to war. Janus knew it. By the wildness in his eyes, Ivor knew it, too, and craved time enough to put Janus in his place, reestablish his superiority. He moved closer to Janus, taking the fight quick and dirty, a matter of brawling as much as swordplay.

“Better hope the one that shoots isn't one who wants you dead,” Ivor gasped, “or I'll have your throne with no effort at all.”

His hand wrapped over the hilt of Janus's sword, attempting to wrench the blade away by force. Janus, prepared for such a move, forced Ivor back with a sudden jut of his elbow against Ivor's jaw. “Then go back to Itarus,” Janus breathed. “Grigor's throne waits.”

Ivor fell back, shook his head, and said, “Father's as hard to remove as a barnacle and as malevolent as a stoat. I could remove every one of my fellow princes, and he'd manage to sire another litter of princelings before he died. Fratricide does grow dull. So, I compromise.”

“Meaning you'll take my throne until yours comes available,” Janus said.

“Not an ideal solution, I own. I am, after all, as loyal a son of Itarus as can be found,” Ivor said. His quick bow was a dare, and Janus took him up on it, charging forward, all his weight committed, and slammed his blade against Ivor's.

“Loyal, right enough. Loyal enough to continue Grigor's plan. You
want
a war between our countries.”

Their blades caught at the hilt; their eyes met for a long moment; and Ivor's face, even behind the grimace of effort, relayed only sincerity as he replied. “I think you would want the same. Nothing clears out the deadwood so well as a war, and I feel both our countries are overburdened with such.”

Janus disentangled their hilts with a quick jerk, catching Ivor off
guard and disarming him. Janus seized Ivor's hilt, though it trembled in his hand, the weight nearly too much for his injured arm. He crossed both blades before Ivor's chest, high enough to be a threat, to make it clear this duel was done. “But, Ivor,” Janus said, “wars are expensive, for both victors and the defeated. Plague, on the other hand, is cheap.”

Ivor flinched. For the first time in their edged friendship, Janus had the advantage, and it had little to do with the steel he wielded. Janus backed Ivor toward the thick hedge of boxwood and thorny roses, and when Ivor ceded the ground, Janus dropped the blades.

The guards surged forward, and Janus waved them off. “There's no need, gentlemen. He'll come quietly, now that I've won. Won't you?”

“Have you won?” Ivor murmured.

He fell silent when Janus reached out, touched the sweaty divot of skin exposed where Ivor's cravat had been ruined by that one quick thrust of Janus's blade.

Ivor swallowed, but turned his head, allowing Janus's fingers to find what he sought: the tiniest run of scars, the only stain on that otherwise well-kept hide. Janus leaned closer, the better to admire it. It wasn't so much; but for Ivor, it represented the one battle he had nearly lost. The one thing he had been powerless against.

Janus touched that tiny scar, and murmured up into Ivor's ear. “All a plague costs are lives and, as you say, Murne is overfull of useless life.”

“What have you done?” Ivor breathed. He shoved Janus off him.

“Thrust,” Janus said, allowing himself a smile. “Parry. Counterthrust. The second useful thing you taught me. And, better still, you said, if parry and counterthrust could be one movement. Your ships might approach our borders, but they will never be on our shores.”

“What have you done?”

“Slipped the plague from its chains,” Janus said, still in that confiding whisper. “I think it will prove a better barrier to your plans than months of diplomatic maneuvers. I doubt even your loyal Itarusine ships will brave such.”

“Plague once survived, can be survived again.”

“True,” Janus said. “But will
you
trust your life to that?”

Ivor licked his lips; his eyes, wider than usual with shock, narrowed suddenly A smile took shape, a ghost of his usual self-satisfaction leaking back. “An elegant bluff, my pet, well aimed, but ultimately unsustainable. Plague, despite your metaphor, is no dog, waiting to be summoned on demand.”

“No,” Janus agreed, and allowed Ivor's face to brighten for a single heartbeat, before he continued, “but it can be
stored
. Aris made a mistake when he turned on Maledicte and sent her to Stones. Ani hated it so much she tried to erase it and all its denizens. She set loose plague, and it's been biding there, fed and nurtured, growing more potent, waiting to be set free.”

Ivor sucked in a breath. “The prisoners' pardon …”

“The prisoners' pardon,” Janus agreed. He nodded to the guards, and they came forward, circling Ivor with wary respect. Janus handed the saber to a guard and said, “He carries a dagger as well. Be watchful.”

They led Ivor away, and Janus settled down on the grass where he stood, blade across his lap, the aftermath of a successful duel weakening his knees. He wondered how Maledicte had stood it, how he had been more fiercely alive after a battle than before. Confronting Ivor left him feeling as if someone had seized him by the throat and shaken him. Wrung out and oddly guilty. Ivor, for his own purposes, had aided him over the years.

Rue's voice drifted across the lawn, coinciding with the sudden fall of petals from a rose above Janus's head. “I came, hotfoot, to see if Ivor had managed to kill you. I'm relieved he's failed.”

“He allowed me to win,” Janus said. “He's a more accomplished duelist than I am.” He brushed snowy petals from his hair, plucked them from his sleeve where they clung to the slow-welling blood. “We must be more cautious now,” Janus said. “Until now—”

“Until now, we could claim we still honored the treaty,” Rue said. “Imprisoning Ivor and killing Harm sends a different message.” He held out a hand. “Come, there's something I want to show you. Your man Delight's been industrious.”

After a pause to have one of Sir Robert's assistants rewrap Janus's wound—Sir Robert refused to do so, called it rewarding foolishness—Rue led Janus onto the tower roof overlooking the city and the sea.

There were rooks lazing about, and Rue picked up a loose piece of coping and threw it into their midst, sending them shrieking off the roof and into the laden trees below.

Janus bent his head to the spyglass, fixed in the direction of the sea. The ocean waters gleamed red in the setting sun, sending sparks of painful color into his eyes. He stepped back, sun dazzled and too close to the edge.

“It's the Itarusine fleet,” Rue said, “waiting a mile outside of our harbor. But what we're interested in is …” He swung the spyglass in its cradle and focused again. “There.”

A single ship in his vision this time. A heavy prow, a series of spiked figureheads. An Itarusine icebreaker making slow headway against the waves. “Grigor's messenger ship, the
Icebear
. Delight said the
Bear
will reach the fleet in two days.”

“Too soon,” Janus said. He needed time. Time for the plague to spread, time to make the city unwelcoming, time to prove that Ivor had killed Aris.

“Tarrant will harry them,” Delight said. Janus leaped away from the spyglass, heart hammering at the man's near-silent approach. Back to his skirts today. DeGuerre must have irritated him again.

“Jumpy,” Delight said. “But I heard you killed a prince today. I suppose I'd be a trifle nervy also.”

“Tarrant,” Janus said.

“He sends me a message,” Delight said, pulling out a scrap of paper from one of the voluminous pockets sewn into his skirts.

“He is a clever man,” Delight said, smiling a little. “Clever enough to find a way ashore when the Itarusine fleet rings us, more clever still to find me in the palace.”

“He came himself?”

“Sent a sailor,” Delight said. “One who was wounded and no longer fit for piracy. Tarrant thinks he can delay the
Bear
one full day, perhaps two.”

Janus calculated. Still not enough time for the plague to be a genuine force. But enough to pretend. “Delight, I need large signal flags made.”

“Flags are rarely useful in land-to-sea communication,” Delight said. “Sea fogs and wave reflections—”

“Plague flags,” Janus said. “I want them flying from every rooftop. I want the Itarusine sailors feared to take a single step ashore.”

“Plague?” Delight asked. He swallowed. “A bluff?”

“No,” Janus said. He turned to look over the edge of the roof again, this time not out to the sea, to the avowed enemy, but to the crowded streets spiderwebbing away from the palace. “Murne suffers from a rat's tangle of dilemmas. Too much of our profits go to Itarus. Too many people are unemployed. Too many people starve. Until we've redone or cast off the treaty with Itarus, there can be no resolution. But even with it gone, there will be too many people. Problems cannot resolve themselves like a candle being blown out. Rather, they smolder and recur.

“We have too many people? We have too many unemployed? Plague is as good a way to winnow the chaff as any. The weakest will die first,” Janus said. “The strong will survive, and there will be jobs aplenty burning and burying the dead. The aristocratic lines that die—their estates will revert to the crown and replenish our coffers.”

“That's madness,” Rue said. “You could not have done this deliberately….”

“I can, and have done,” Janus said. “But, remember, Rue, you chose to follow me. If you have doubts, only ask yourself, would Black-Winged Ani treat our people any better?”

SYKE WATCHED HER NEW MAIDS
flutter about her rooms in a smothering cloud of black cloth, their faces drawn. The duchess had trained them well enough that Psyke need say nothing, only sit like a sculpture while they set right the neglect that had been slowly eroding the gentility of her days, made it all too easy to be lost in the strangeness of having other voices in her mind. With each plumped pillow, each dusted shelf, each dress shaken out and ironed, Psyke felt more herself, the Countess of Last, and less a vessel for the dead.

Perhaps not a sculpture of a woman, she mused, but a spider at the heart of her web. She waited patiently and was rewarded, as night drew in, as the other maids sought out the evening chores, by a single maid coming in to dress her for dinner. The girl was tall, slim, and kept her face downcast, her hair arranged in an improbable Kyrdic fashion.

“I suppose the long fringe hides the eye patch,” Psyke said, and the woman stopped pretending. She sat sideways on the chair before the dressing table, facing Psyke.

“You expected me.”

Psyke felt a surge of indignation touch her, and it took her a moment to realize the outrage was her own. She reined it back, and said, “Where else would you go when Prince Ivor is no shelter any
longer? His rooms scrutinized, and you so ardently sought on the streets. Judging by your accent, you're a long way from home. The Explorations?”

“I have no home,” she said. “Nor name. That much is true. Also true: I can aid you… teach you how to resist the gifts of the god or to use them. If you shelter me. If I'm found, then Ivor will be disgraced or killed. I would not cause him hurt.”

“You killed Aris,”
Psyke said, and the woman fell silent, as if she had forgotten that death lay between them.

The girl collected Psyke's face brush, spun it in her fingers, transferring a dusting of powder to her nails. She wiped her fingers on her gown, leaving ghostly streaks against the black.

“You offer me nothing of use,” Psyke said. “Knowledge I have already gained, and your bargain benefits only you. If you wish me to keep you from the gallows, to keep Ivor safe behind his shield of privilege, I need something more.”

The girl gnawed her lip, denting its full red with white teeth, feral yet determined. “I can help you with Black-Winged Ani,” she said. Her voice flatted out, all musicality stripped bare by evident fear.