Kings and Assassins (8 page)

Janus will kill him to see his ambitions met
.

Madness
, she thought, her dreaming mind dragged into waking, grief playing with her mind as well as her heart. Aris sighed and on the breath faded completely.

She scrabbled out of the linens, dropped gracelessly to the floor when her knees buckled under Laudables pervasive hold and her own fear.

She glanced up at the man by the door, embarrassed he found her in such disarray. “Challacombe. Is Adiran guarded?”

I did warn you
, he said, still bracing himself against the wall. A lit cigarillo made a tiny flame near his thigh, burning red and redder as he let it dangle.
The face Janus presents is only a mask, but you gave him your heart along with your body
.

She was across the room before she knew it, numb limbs forgotten in reflexive outrage that he should speak to her so, but the blow she dealt him only bruised her own hand as it passed through his shadowed flesh and brushed stone.

Whimpering, cold to the bone, she backed away. Aris's ghost, she understood; it was the product of her grieving mind. This …

The assassin killed me in the passageways, left my body for rats. Yet Janus walks free
. Challacombe disappeared as Aris had done, leaving only a lingering scent of smoke.

Psyke collapsed, stones clammy against her bare legs. Her head spun; what
was
this? Her shoulders burned and ached, and a moment half remembered washed over her: standing in the chapel, staring at the assassin's tumble of dark curls, and feeling cold hands pull her close, shield her in the scent of earth. The scent of the grave.

Challacombe's accusation lingered, settled in the crevices of her heart. It was true enough, she knew it by the aching sense of betrayal that stirred beneath her grief and guilt.

She'd wedded Janus to serve as Aris's spy, to pick out truth from pretense, and instead, She'd been lulled, first into relaxing her suspicion and then, damningly, into supporting him. Hadn't she argued just last night that perhaps Aris misjudged Janus? That as unlikely as it seemed, perhaps Maledicte had acted of his own accord without Janus's instruction? Minutes later, her king was dead at the hand of a courtier who had been buried months ago.

Janus profits when men die
. It wasn't a ghost this time, only a memory. A phrase heard more than once, a phrase that Aris used against Janus's charm like a shield.

Janus profits when men die
. She shuddered. One step closer to the throne.

Protect Adiran
, Aris had pled.

The lingering lassitude in her bones, the sluggish pulse of blood and breath, gave way to fear-inspired haste. She scrambled to her feet.

If the guards, if even Janus's sworn detractors like the Duchess of Love had found him blameless of Aris's murder, then they had no reason to deny him the nursery.

Psyke's hysteria, her own weakness and shock, had betrayed more than her own respectability. She hadn't been able to explain herself last night, had only been able to hold on to the truth: Aris died and it was Janus's doing. Maledicte's hand but Janus's command. Rue had dismissed her first strangled explanations outright, and she had faltered to rabbit muteness when Janus arrived.

Her gaze flew to the bellpull, but Janus had dismissed Dahlia last night; and even if Dahlia did answer Psyke's summons, the girl's clumsiness and nervous questions would slow her rather than aid.

Psyke ransacked her wardrobe, seeking a particular gown. Another mourning dress, a dusty, dull navy with one singular virtue; it buttoned up the front. With the worst of the wrinkles shaken out, the dust brushed away, she set about dressing herself. Her fingers wanted to linger on each jet button, tasting the death of her sisters, her mother, her friends with each stone, but she had no time for old tears now. Aris's voice, that bled-out urgency, still echoed in her ears.
Adiran—
he begged.
Adiran
.

She pressed her feet into satin slippers and felt them sting like splinters. Kicking them off again, she rubbed her toes against the stone floor, felt the yawning emptiness of the intervening spaces and the chapel below in the sheltering earth.

The chapel of the murdered king: They'd call it that in years to come, she thought, long after they knew who had died and why. The Cold King was proof of that, his name near forgotten in the common way of things, but Thomas Redoubt had been her ancestor.

And, she realized abruptly, the scaled man who had guided her dream. His wing, his bones lost in it for all eternity.

Psyke yanked open her door, fled into the hall, away from her own thoughts and the ghosts that lingered at the edge of her vision. Aris, still entreating. Challacombe with his hooded eyes. Others yet lurking in the shadowy halls.

The hour was early yet, Psyke knew; the shocked quiet in the palace, the way the Laudable still clung to her, the crisp chill of granite beneath her feet—surely Janus would expect her to lie later abed. And even one such as he must balk at killing an innocent; if she hurried, she could station herself at Adiran's side, as much a guard as any soldier. If she had no weapons to bear but her rank and her eyes as witness, she would pit those against Janus's sword.

The nursery door was swinging closed behind the maid when Psyke reached it, five hallways and two flights of stairs later, out of breath and still bundling up the mass of her hair.

The guards looked askance at her disarray but stepped aside to
allow her entrance. The nurserymaid looked up from the low table she was setting with child-sized utensils, and dropped into a hasty curtsy “My lady.”

“Elysses,” Psyke said. “Where is Adiran?”

His absence was unusual. Twelve years old, and yet he lacked language or more than basic rudiments of intelligence. His dogs were more capable of learning lessons than Adiran. Still, the boy understood time well enough, and this was the hour when Aris came and ate breakfast with him. Usually, the boy prince would be hovering at Elysses's side, snitching bits of his favorite pastries.

“The window, my lady,” Elysses said. Her gaze rested on Psyke's creased skirts, on the long tangle of her loose hair for a moment, fascinated with Psyke's unusual disorder, before she recalled the question. She gestured behind her, toward the draped window that overlooked the city.

Adiran had clambered up onto the narrow ledge, balancing unevenly against the glass. Psyke moved to pull him down, and Elysses said, “I wouldn't. He's been doing that ever since that damned… He must have seen him come in through the window.” She shook her head, trying to loose the unpleasant reminders, hid in practicality. “He'll come down when he's hungry.”

Maledicte again
, Psyke thought. A weight in the palace, the shadow that they would never be free of.

The boy pressed delicate fingers above his head, tracing ripples in the glass, spreading his hands out like the jut of rising wings.

Elysses finished setting out the plates, and Adiran hopped down with an unsettling agility, pointing out that this collection of rooms was his kingdom and that he was the master of it.

Psyke clenched her jaw against sudden tears. How would they ever begin to explain the loss to Adiran, the sudden absence of his father? As if her thoughts summoned him, a faint gray smear shimmered in her vision; Aris settling into the rocking chair, watching his son.

Adiran balked at the table, studying the plates.

There weren't enough, Psyke realized. Aris ate with him; the table should be set for two.

Adiran backed away from the table, confused by an inexplicable change, and stopped before Psyke. His gaze was on her bare toes poking out beneath her skirts; a smile glimmered on his mouth. Then he raised his eyes to meet hers, a blue as bright as forget-me-nots, as a summer sky.

She wished they could stay untroubled, clear of pain; but even as she did, his eyes widened, filling with a grief so profound that Psyke was shaken to her core. While she tried to understand how this could be—how the child who knew nothing of reading nor of the ways of the world could read the death in her eyes—he opened his mouth and screamed.

ANUS LEFT THE LIBRARY
,
CATCHING
Walker and Simpson arguing in whispers, heads bent together. They sprang apart, and Simpson's teeth clicked closed on the hissed end of Janus's name.

Simpson
, Janus thought, one of his regular attending guards. And apparently one who thought Janus should be waiting out the hunt for the assassin in a cell.

“Where to, my lord?” Walker said, valiantly attempting to distract Janus from Simpson's words and the weight they left in the air between them. He fingered the scars on his face in a gesture Janus had learned was habitual when under stress.

“The nursery,” Janus answered. Without waiting for their response, he headed for the carpeted stairs up to the third floor.

Janus had not been in the nursery since the night he murdered Auron, but as he approached it, he heard all-too-familiar sounds: a child shrieking, the dogs in full cry—a fury of snarling, snapping—and bleeding through it all, voices of two women near to weeping. Despite himself, Janus turned to sweep the hall with his gaze, half expecting Maledicte to burst from shadow, blade bared, for the thick-laid carpets to grow bloodstains again, for time to reverse itself.

The shadows of the men moved like the flutter of wings, and the fine hairs on Janus's nape rose like a dog's hackles. He pushed past
the nursery guards, pressed open the door with a pounding heart, though he knew from their unhappy calm that the uproar inside was harmless.

The door slipped free from his hand, slammed back against the wall, shaking plaster dust loose and tipping one of Adiran's clockwork carriages over, setting the horse's legs to twitching spasmodically.

Three sets of eyes met his in varying shades of startlement. Hela, one of Adiran's two mastiffs, raised her head at Janus's sudden entrance, woofing softly to express her displeasure. Across the room, Bane, chained to the radiator, peeled back black lips and snarled. His ivory teeth slowed Janus's hasty steps; they glistened evilly and were larger than the pieces of whale ivory the sailors sold for lunas ashore.

Adiran hiccupped, his red-faced weeping pausing for a heartbeat, and then beginning again, though softer. The nurserymaid dropped her eyes immediately, hands fisting in the folds of her skirt, a handful of candies falling to the floor, and being gobbled up by Hela.

Psyke rose from where she knelt, trying to tempt the prince with one of several toys. Janus found his throat drying as she approached him, her steps soundless, oddly delicate as she evaded the broken pieces of some previously refused toy. Her breath was inaudible over the sound of Adiran's weeping, and Janus couldn't help but recall those long hours of the night when her silence had been that of the grave.

“What's happening here?” Janus said. He stepped back as she approached, his boot heels crunching on glass. She paused in her forward steps and bent to collect another toy. She brushed glass off its sides before answering him.

“The boy, my lord, is grieving.”

“Does he even understand grief?” Janus asked.

She reached out to stroke Adiran's matted curls, and he shrank back, crying more shrilly, in a tantrum unlike any Janus had imagined the boy capable of.

Adiran let Psyke press a toy into his clenching hands, a wooden ship, carved, painted, and gilded. He held it for a moment and then hurled it. Across the room, the nurserymaid yelped and ducked.

“Enough!” Janus said. His head was aching, trying to decide if grief was a sign of increasing wisdom or not—after all, dogs had been known to pine themselves to death over a lost master and no one considered them rivals to man. “Don't just stand there and weep, girl. Fetch Sir Robert to give the boy a potion.”

“Do no such thing, Elysses,” Psyke said in immediate contradiction. It startled him, though it shouldn't have. She had made her position clear enough when she accused him of killing Aris, but he had eight months of her quiet passivity to unlearn.

“He'll make himself ill,” Janus said.

“Better that than to swallow anything you offer,” Psyke said. Janus took a step back at the cold knowledge in her expression.

She turned back to Adiran, shaping her expression to sweetness, her voice to light. “Here, Adiran,” she said. “Take your toy.” The boy scuttled back from her, grabbing tight to Bane's heavy chain and leather collar, baring his teeth at her, his eyes swelling shut with all the tears he'd shed.

Janus said, “Seems to me it's you who are upsetting him, not Aris's absence.”

He glanced back toward the low table, saw the plates laid out, and thought, grief or not, intelligent or not, Adiran understood time and absence well enough. Janus grasped Psyke's shoulders, felt her go as rigid as a corpse in his hands, and moved her bodily from his path, remembering belatedly the wounds on her shoulders. She, no doubt, would think he had pressed upon them with careful deliberation. So be it.