Kings and Assassins (9 page)

“Adiran,” Janus said. Bane snarled, deep and low, a rumble that made itself felt in Janus's bones. He moved forward cautiously, and put one hand on Bane's withers, gambling that time spent feeding the hounds treats would garner results now. His other hand fell gently on Adiran's narrow shoulder. The boy let out a tiny moan and fell into Janus's side.

Psyke made a sound of outraged protest that brought a smile to his face. There were many things Adiran couldn't learn, but Aris had taught the boy about family. And before Janus had fallen from grace,
Aris had brought Janus to the nursery often, teaching Adiran to trust his cousin.

Janus released Bane, who growled halfheartedly but licked at his palm in passing, and took Adiran up into his arms. The boy clung to him, thin limbs tight around his back and neck, his sobs dying as Janus awkwardly rubbed Adiran's shoulders. He'd seen Aris do so before, and Adiran reacted much as the dog did, relaxing against his will. It was a good thing the boy was so small—his arms and legs were awkwardly long as it was. Janus rocked in place, afraid to step forward and trip in the tangle of the boy's dangling legs.

“Put him down,” Psyke said. Her eyes were huge and shadowed in her face, bruised looking, as if Adiran's affection toward Janus injured her.

“And start the weeping again? Perhaps your nerves can stand it. Mine cannot.” He shifted his grip on Adiran, rearranged the boy, and began walking toward the center of the room and the low table there. “If my presence disturbs you, you may leave. I am quite competent to care for one boy.”

Psyke's response was lost to him; Janus passed the glass-paned doors to the inner bedroom, and saw Auron's crib still standing there, the wood varnished where blood had been spilled.

Mad
, he thought, Aris had been mad to keep this reminder in place. Adiran raised his head when Janus paused in his steps; his frail neck twisted as he looked to see what Janus saw.

He sighed hugely and murmured something in the childish glossolalia that passed for the majority of his speech.

Psyke's lips firmed. She came closer, reached her arms out to take Adiran from him, and the boy recoiled.

“No!” he cried. “No!” and buried his hot-cheeked, wet face into Janus's neck, new tears seeping into his cravat.

“Seems he's made himself clear,” Janus said. “Guards, would you escort Lady Last out?”

Psyke shook her head at once. “No. I'll see myself out, if I must. The guards will stay and attend to Adiran's safety.”

“You don't trust me? My sweet, I'm devastated,” Janus said, trying
for insouciance, and yet—the growl came through. Her lies could have cost him everything. He could imagine the whispers now, “Even his
wife
thinks him a villain….”

In the corner, Bane raised his heavy head, pricked his ears. The chain holding him jangled; he paced to the end of it and echoed Janus's growl, facing Psyke.

Her cheekbones tipped red. “I am neither a dog nor a fool to be easily misled by a superficial charm. I know you for what you are.”

“As I know you now,” he said. “I trust we are both enlightened.” He set Adiran down at the table, urging him to his routine.

Psyke turned on her heel, her skirt flaring out to reveal shoeless feet beneath the heavy wool, as if she had rushed to Adiran's side as soon as she had awoken. Or as if she no longer felt the chill of stony floors.

Adiran paused in his desultory forking up of boiled egg mash and venison. He watched Psyke leave, the guards opening and closing the door for her, and tugged on Janus's sleeve.

Janus bent his head down, the better to hear the boy prince's whisper. No random collection of sound this, but a single questioning syllable. “Dead?”

He shook off the chill the boy's clear voice left and sighed, “Adi, such is life. Everyone dies or leaves you. Best look out for yourself.”

I
VOR TOOK CARE HUNTING HIS
prey through the palace, using the skills of a lifetime spent in court, passing a few minutes of gossip here with that courtly sycophant Savne, listening quietly to Admiral DeGuerre as he spoke with Bull, ostensibly waiting his chance to express the Itarusine court's sympathy, and finally, heard one boyish page fretting to another that Last and his wife were in the nursery, trying to soothe the prince.

The placement was unfortunate; it took him some time to find a page harried enough to allow him entrance to the private floors of Aris's residence, long enough that he found his quarry coming to him instead.

All good things
, he thought, and tried to make his smile pleasant instead of wicked.

The Countess of Last rocked back on her heels, and displayed an unflattering and entirely impolite suspicion.

“Prince Ivor,” she said, and though etiquette demanded an acknowledgment of his rank more sweeping than her bare words, she withheld it from him in an insolence he thought better suited to her husband. “What brings you here?”

“My lady,” he said. “I came to bear condolences to the crown prince on behalf of my country. Quite pointless, I understand, given the boy's circumstances; still, basic courtesies are rarely unwelcome.”

She flushed, taking his words as a reproach for her rudeness, and he noted it—new to insolence and not native to her nature. He wondered if she had learned it from Janus or if she was recalling it from some other source. In all his studies of the Antyrrian court, he hadn't paid much attention to Janus's wife, taking it for granted that the gossip had sketched her correctly, a sweet, unquestioning woman, intelligent but not clever, Aris's favorite of the court women and his eyes upon his troublesome nephew.

Ivor's own spies assured him that after the death of her family, she was like to avoid confrontation at all costs, to plead for peace over bloodshed; in other words, a woman much like Aris. Ivor had never considered that she might be witness to the assassination, or that she would attempt to use the same against her husband. His interest had doubled overnight.

“I wonder at you pushing in to disturb a family in mourning. A note would have sufficed,” she said. The words came out stiffly, oddly spaced as if she had to work to offend, had to draw again on the pool of something other.

Instead of doing as she so obviously wished, taking affront and leaving, he curved his lips into a smile. “You have spine behind your sweetness,” he said. “I suppose it should come as no surprise. After all, you have witnessed some truly terrible crimes, or so gossip gives me to understand, including Aris's murder—”

“I will not discuss that with you.” Psyke turned to walk away from him, then balked, as if belatedly realizing that to do so would allow him free access to the halls behind her and the nursery.

Ivor let his smile broaden. No, she was no practiced schemer. Her
every thought betrayed itself in the sway of her body even if her face remained a mask.

Ivor would have gambled a pouch of Antyrrian sols that she confounded Janus. While Janus had been in Itarus, letting Ivor teach him how to be something more than a Relict rat, he had spoken often of his fierce Miranda. Focused entirely on the girl he had been forcibly parted from, he never paid the type of attention he should have to the noblewomen of the Itarusine court. More, Janus's obsession with Miranda had led Ivor to a truth Janus would no doubt prefer buried.

Maledicte, the effeminate courtier who, by all accounts, had captured Janus's attention the very moment he laid eyes on him, who had him running tame by his side, in his bed within a night… Maledicte could only be the Relict girl, Miranda.

And it followed, therefore, that Maledicte had eluded death as easily as Miranda had eluded her original fate in the Relicts. After all, the body hung above the gates had been male.

Ivor stepped to the side as if to pass Psyke by, brushing close enough to taste her scent in the warmed air between them, pungent and earthy, like clay brought into the sun. She jerked away from him, breath quickening, her pulse beating in the hollow of her throat.

“You feel threatened,” he said, “here in the heart of the palace?”

“Aris is dead,” Psyke said. “Why shouldn't I feel fear?”

Ivor leaned against the flocked wallpaper—a style ten years old and worn beneath his palms—and smiled lazily at her.

“How highly you prize yourself. A wife is a small thing, easily set aside and forgotten. A king, however… only death will see him gone.”

The woman paled, licked her lips, a pale pink tongue touching skin one shade lighter. Ivor's smile grew; whether Janus admired her or not, she was a sweet piece, all rose and cream and gold, the very epitome of an Antyrrian maid. Her words though, her words were as cold and hard as jet. “I never said I feared for myself.”

She glanced back over her shoulder at the shadows draping the nursery door.

He used a booted foot to press himself from the wall, stalked her
in a graceful circle, watching her turn to keep him always in her sight. Once, when his boots came too close to her skirts, she twitched them back, giving him a charming view of pale arches and a bare stretch of heel and toe.

“No,” he agreed. He raised a hand, watched her eyes grow wary as his touch neared her face, but this time, she refused to flinch or back away. He let his fingertips fall lightly over the curve of her cheek, found it as cool and smooth as ancient marble. “No, I see that. I should have expected nothing less from one who escaped Mirabile's trap.”

At the mention of Mirabile's name, her eyes darkened. “She dallied too long,” Psyke whispered. “Gloated too much, and I… fled.”

“You showed remarkable sense for a woman,” Ivor said, meaning it. He knew men who would have shown less intelligence, men who would have gone after Mirabile with a blade and met a gruesome end. “Which surprises me the more that you showed so little yesterday. Accusing your husband of treason was not only rash but ill-advised.”

Psyke's chin firmed. “I had to speak,” she said. “He killed Aris as surely as if he wielded the blade himself.”

Ivor let out a breath, fought the urge to smile.
This
was why he had hunted her,
this
was what he had needed to hear: How had she managed to witness Aris's death without falling to his agent's sword?

“Did you see it happen? See his stalking horse so clearly that you could name him one of Janus's men?”

The stiffness of her body shifted in an instant from rigidity to something softer, leaning toward him. Her gaze traced his face, gauged his interest, his sincerity, and found it satisfactory.

Ivor bent his brow into deeper earnestness, when he badly wanted to smile. She burned to tell him, her very body vibrated with the need to relive the murder, to be reassured that she had done right, that she was not to blame.
A woman's weakness
, he thought,
to care so desperately about the opinions of others
.

Some of his amusement must have leaked through, because she drew back. “You needn't think I'll tell you anything I haven't already told Captain Rue.”

“But
I
might believe you.” A gamble, a large one, but she had the air about her, that bruised outrage.

She came closer still, her head barely reaching the level of his heart. He took her elbow in his, guided her down the hallway, away from the nursery she wanted to defend, finding a quiet spot near the main landing. She came quietly, docile enough now that she was promised a listening ear. “I thought Janus your friend,” she said.

He lowered his voice, made it intimate, and watched her fidget. “Had I time, my sweet, I would tell you such tales of Janus in the Itarusine court as to make your blood freeze. Your husband is that most dangerous of creatures, a savage beast with an agile mind.”

“Yet you spoke to his innocence,” Psyke said. “I cannot trust your words or your intentions.”

Ivor shrugged, insouciance in the shift of his shoulders, as if he had no real interest in what she might say. Her need for an audience, he thought, was strong enough for him to allow a touch of contempt to lace his voice. “I only spoke truth,” he said. “You did not, and yet I am the one to distrust? You accuse Janus of regicide when he was so distinctly elsewhere. Tell me, did you truly witness the crime, or did you merely seize the moment with the impetuousness and arrogance of an Antyrrian noble, sure no one would dare contradict you?”

The flush rose in her cheeks so fast that her hands flew to cover them, as if she felt the rage and embarrassment might welt her skin. She shook her head once, twice, as if she were shaking his words away. Her hair, only loosely pinned, slid free.

Bare feet, worn navy gown, loosened hair; Ivor wondered how roughly Janus had treated her last night to set her fleeing her quarters without even a care for her appearance.

“It was foolish,” Ivor said, “to make an enemy of Janus.”

“It would be more foolish to keep quiet and see Janus profit when Aris died.” Her reply was immediate; her eyes ablaze with fury.

“Then share his description with me, with the guards. Steal that profit from him.” Ivor gave her his most vulpine grin. “And spare me the indignity of Rue's men searching my wing three times over now, hunting some cause to blame Itarus. My father would dislike that, and the treaty that binds our countries in friendship—”

“Friendship,” Psyke said. “When you bleed us dry—”

A page scuttled by his tight-drawn shoulders and lowered head a tangible reflection of their raised voices. Psyke turned from Ivor abruptly toward the stairs.

Ivor pulled her back, hands wrapping easily about her narrow waist. “Who did you see that made it evident Janus was behind it?” He breathed the words into her ear, felt her tremble, rage and fear commingled, and almost envied Janus this wife who felt so much. “Who did you see that made your Captain Rue think you a liar or a madwoman? Someone, perhaps, you had thought dead….”

Another gamble this, but a smaller one. After all, Ivor knew the assassin intimately, and knew what Psyke must have seen, if she had seen anything at all: a dark-haired courtier wielding a blade like a vengeful spirit.

“I saw—” Her voice wavered, faltered.

He released her, though he stayed skin close, resting his weight at her back, the plummet of the stairs before her. If she needed leading, he would clap the bridle on.