Kings and Assassins (5 page)

She followed its cue, making her way through the dark until a faint bleed through of light and the sounds of uneasy horses led her into the oldest stall in the palace. She waited for their curiosity to override their sense of duty, and crept out into the palace mews. The horses nearest her raised their heads and whinnied at the scent of blood.

In the torchlight, she found herself gore smeared, nearly head to foot. A quick casting about found a stable boy's cheap woolen coat laid over a bale of hay. She dragged it on, rinsed her face in a horse trough, scrubbing off the worst of the blood, before heading into the night and the docks.

She'd have to find a message boy to take a carefully worded missive to Ivor. Ivor's plans were thorough, his temperament nerveless; still, things had changed. It wasn't simply Janus he was challenging, and the court; there was a god returned to the city and what gods wanted all too often boded ill for mortal ways.

ANUS STRODE THROUGH THE HALL
at an unfashionably quick pace, blind to the luxuries that usually soothed him; the eggshell and gilt papered walls, the raised niches that once held small idols and now held a fortune's worth of spring roses in blue vases. Now he noticed only that the plush carpet was unpleasantly stained in a staggered, crimson trail, showing the path Aris's body had come.

Once outside the royal residence, the lingering scent of blood gave way to waxed flagstones and polished wood, and approaching him, the prince-ascendant, no doubt coming to offer his aid to a palace in chaos. Ivor smiled, that same complacent amusement he gave those whose job it was to entertain him. “A lucky thing you sought my company tonight,” Ivor said.

“Your company changed nothing,” Janus said, voice as brittle as his nerves. “They still suspect me, think it my plan if not my hand.” Janus was in no mood to play the role so clearly outlined for him: meek with gratitude that Ivor's company had saved him from immediate arrest.

“Shall I vouch for your sterling character?” Ivor said.

Janus found himself more frustrated yet by the laughter in Ivor's eyes. He wanted Ivor to feel the same confusion, the same unfocused pain. He drew back his hand in a fist, all poise gone, reduced to the Relict rat who wanted to share his hurt.

Ivor seized Janus's hand before he could strike, using his calmer temper to gain control. “Oh, you know better, pet,” Ivor said. “Temper leads only to mistakes.”

“Let me go,” Janus gritted out.

“Prince Ivor,” Rue said, coming down the corridor with another squad of kingsguards behind him. “The palace is unsettled. It would be best if you returned to your quarters. The country cannot afford to have another Itarusine auditor killed on our shores.”

Ivor stepped back from Janus and smiled at the captain. “I don't think there's any danger of that.”

Janus bit back a growl, and watched as Rue and the guards managed to sweep Ivor up in their passage, asking questions about the servants Ivor had brought with him, allowing Janus to escape.

A familiar dark head passed, and Janus reached out, shoved Savne against the wall. The young courtier, an obsequious hanger-on of his, lost his breath and Janus took ruthless advantage of it. After all, it wasn't often that Savne could be silenced.

“Where is my wife?” Janus asked.

“Last—” Savne gasped, throat obstructed. The glossy dark hair, the dark eyes, the pale face flushing to red with the pressure on his throat—Janus released him, a little shaken. Savne was a poor imitation of Maledicte, and one made pathetic by being so deliberate, but even that false face made him ache with loss.

“Where is Psyke?” Janus said. “I know you're Lovesy's man. She escorted my wife where?”

“Just to her quarters, just that.”

“Be more precise,” Janus snapped. “If you must ape Mal, recall his words were never less than precise.”

“Lady Last has been returned to her own quarters,” Savne said, rubbing his throat with shaking fingers.

Janus swung away from him, making for the stairs to the old wing, and Savne called after him, “'Tis a pity her door is well guarded. Rue holds her in near as much regard as the king did.”

“Fool,” Janus said under his breath. Savne lacked even the meanest intelligence to fuel his spite. Psyke and Aris? Yes, the court whispered and gossiped over their closeness, but Janus knew better. Aris
feared intimacy with women, feared another child born mindless. Psyke had been Aris's spy now declared herself Janus's enemy and that was a matter of far more import than whether or not shed cuckolded him.

The chill of the old wing flowed down to meet him as he closed on the uncarpeted stairwell. He made short work of the stairs, and the palace servants that saw him made haste to clear his way.

Two blue-clad kingsguards, a young man and an older one, watched him approach with expressions veering toward dismay and panic. The guard was soft these days; the most seasoned had followed their maimed Captain Jasper into the ranks of the city Particulars, where they tried to discipline an increasingly troubled populace. The remaining guards were the lazy ones who wouldn't leave a familiar life for confrontations on the streets, the greenest of recruits, and the few paranoid loyalists who thought a threat to Aris would come from within the palace walls and not without. Janus doubted they enjoyed being proved right.

The young guard, showing more bravery than sense, made the mistake of stepping forward, hand raised to slow Janus. It was a moment's work to step into the man's reach; the recruit's hand went to his blade, but he was too slow or too uncertain to draw it. Janus pinned the guard's sword arm behind his back before the lad could finish dithering. Using the boy as a shield, Janus pushed the other guard back and slammed the door open to his wife's chambers, an incongruous clutter of pastel and gilt furnishings adrift in a granite cave.

An opened interior door granted him sight of his goal: Psyke sat at her dressing table like a statue. If she had been overwrought and frantic when he had last seen her, now she had plunged into despairing stillness. The only liveliness about her was her voice, issuing a series of commands to her maid. “No, Dahlia. I don't need to change my gown. I don't need an infusion of Laudable, and I don't need you.”

Dahlia fumbled the pearlescent bottle, dropped it, staggered forward trying to catch it, and squeaked when Janus made his entrance, the guard struggling in his grip.

Psyke's stillness only grew deeper, an animal freezing before a predator's gaze.

“Get out, girl,” Janus said. Dahlia, after a last look at her mistress, darted for the door, leaving the bottle rocking on the carpet. Janus shoved the young guard after her, and bolted the door whose latch, like all those in the old wing, would withstand armies.

Assured of their privacy, Janus paced the room, trying to outwait that furious pounding in his chest. Right now, he wanted her dead, wanted that delicate neck between his hands—it wouldn't take much effort. She was thin boned and slight, untrained in even the slightest defense, as helpless as a rabbit before a hound.

Psyke sat motionless, though her hands twisted in her lap, knotting and unknotting over the bloody patches Aris's death had left, and her eyes sought escape as fervently as any prisoner faced with the gallows.

“Tell me,” he said, and the deep growl of his voice made her jump. “What wrong have I ever done you that you would tell such a lie?” It was hard to come at her obliquely when all he wanted to do was demand the truth: Had she truly seen Maledicte? But that question couldn't be asked, not without betraying the deadly secret he had kept for near a year: that Maledicte lived.

“Lies?” she said. “I told none.” Her voice wavered, thin and reedy, uncertain. She turned her back to him, but in the age-mottled mirror before her, her eyes were resolute.

Janus let out his breath. “You should have held your tongue until you knew where I had been. If you hate me so much that you would see me hanged for treason, it's best to know my whereabouts before you make your accusations.”

He approached her, felt stiff with controlling his rage, more a toy soldier than a man. Her eyes followed each step with rising worry; her hands fled her skirts, shifted to fiddle with the jumble of artifacts on her dressing table. A tarnished silver-backed brush, bristles nearly worn away; a child's locket; a scatter of stained ribbons. Not the usual clutter, Janus knew, but something closer to a shrine, the grisly mementos of her murdered family.

She shook her head, breaking the connection between their glass-caught gazes. Head lowered, voice small, she said, “Your whereabouts are irrelevant when you have a killer on a leash.”

He reached out to shake the smugness from her mouth, the prim hatred from her eyes; and she jumped away, spinning, standing, nearly falling over her seat. She pressed her back to the wall, and her expression veered toward panic. He seized her shoulders, gratified that she shuddered beneath his hands.

“Your lie injured your cause as well,” he said. “The entire court whispers that the witch Mirabile left you mad when she slaughtered your family. Do you think this lie did anything to counter it?”

“Careful,” Psyke said, a weird wild light in her eyes. “Be cautious which weapons you marshal against me. If no one believes my words tonight, neither do they trust yours. There is no madness in me—”

“Appearances are everything in this court. Abandon your grief; wallowing in the past will only cause you misery in the present.”

He reached for her again and she quailed; he caught her hands, dragged them down to her skirts. “Feel that?”

The cloth, stiff with blood, resisted their touch, crinkled against the weight of their joined hands. “Tell me, my sweet, how mad must one be before one refuses to change out of a blood-soaked gown. To accuse one's husband of regicide on no evidence at all?”

Her gaze shied from his, fell to the clotted stains, dark even against the dull navy of her dress. Her hands in his trembled and grew cold. “How mad,” he whispered, “to not even notice that you reek of Aris's death?”

“A death you caused,” she whispered, even as her weight folded inward, her legs giving out. Janus tightened his grip, dragged her to face him.

Her eyes were the blind blue of summer skies.

“Aris is dead. My king dead,” she whispered. Her hands fluttered, tightened on his sleeves, so lost that she clutched him as an anchor.

He shook her off. “Aris
is
dead. Most inconveniently so.” His temper swelled at the memory of Ivor's smile, and settled only when he thought Rue, at least, would be making the man's evening near as uncomfortable
as Janus's promised to be. “Aris was a fool to hold his rendezvous with no one but yourself to guard him. Not even his hounds! The man
wanted
to be killed and, by the gods, someone obliged.”

She slapped him. It wasn't much, a feeble blow, but the quickness of it, the angry glitter in her eyes, made him flinch. His enemy indeed.

“He was your king and your kin,” she said, and the fury in her voice was the fury of generations bound by tradition and unthinking loyalty.

“And such kinship,” Janus said. “To allow my abandonment, to turn my mother whore. Aris knew my father threw me away like refuse and said nothing until I was needed. Kinship means nothing to me but pain and rejection.” He found himself panting, his breath hot as it rebounded from her bent head.

“So you destroyed it? When a country depended on Aris? You allowed your pain to rule you? Set your paramour upon a good man?”

“Enough, Psyke,” he snapped. “No one will listen to you.”

“I will make them believe me.”

“Make them believe the dead walk? This is the age of reason, my sweet.” Janus forced a contempt into his voice he didn't feel,
couldn't
feel. The age of reason, yes, but a reason under siege by sickness and starvation, beset by fears of war and an uncertain future.

“And a man that didn't die? Is that reasonable enough for you, my lord?” Her lips curved into a smile, but she couldn't hold it. They trembled and her next words were whispers. “I am not blind, Janus. Nor am I a fool. And bodies can be had for the taking. Tell me, my lord, whose blood did you spill to spare his? Another innocent's? Another good man's?”

She slumped, and he nearly believed her fatigue, but years of Maledicte's companionship had taught him caution. Still, when her nails slashed at his eyes, he was taken off guard. He ducked; her clawing hands caught in his hair, and he grabbed her wrists, grinding the bones tight. She thrashed against him, kicked and cursed in a way that he had no idea an aristocratic lady could.

He dropped them both to the carpet, jarring her silent, pinning her beneath his weight, thankful that she was so slight. Maledicte
would have left him bruised at best, and worse—he'd suffered from Maledicte's love of sharp objects before.

“Tell me,” he gasped. “Tell me what you saw.”

“Maledicte,” she spat. “Just that. All dark hair in the shadows.”

Hardly conclusive
, he thought. Men of Maledicte's coloring were rare in Antyre, being both dark haired and pale skinned, but common enough in Itarus. The assassin could be any of Ivor's men.