Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  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.”

  The blue-clad kingsguards wavered for a moment but parted before him, revealing the death Janus could smell in the air.

  King Aris was dead, and violently so, his chest riven open, and his blood spilling darkly over the stone floors, trapping lamplight and giving back shadow. Janus's breath lodged in his throat, snagged on a cry of wild outrage. Not this. Not yet.

  The delicately boned woman cradling the king in her arms looked up at Janus's gasp; her tear-blurred blue eyes grew wide, her mouth opened, and his wife cried, “Murderer!” at the sight of him.

  ♦ 2 ♦

  ANUS LEANED BACK AGAINST THE cold stone jamb, numb with shock, listening to the echoes of Psyke's accusation ring off the looming idols and slowly disperse. When Captain Rue failed to act on Psyke's cry, Janus let out a breath, and let his attention filter outward.

  The dusty chapel was overfull of people and voices: the hushed back and forth between the king's guards; Psyke's broken weeping; and, beneath it all, a tremor—the lingering shiver of the summoning bell and Aris's last, dying breath.

  Once Rue had loosened Psyke's grip on Aris's body, he organized the bloody scene into something approaching order with a ruthless hand and a voice that he never needed to raise. Janus found enough rationality left in him to think that Rue was stronger than he first seemed, a young man in an old man's role.

  A kingdom for young men, he remembered Aris saying. The old men grow bitter and twisted by war and old enmities, but youth … Aris had touched Janus's fair hair in benediction. Youth is our only hope for the future. It had felt like unconditional approval, the first he had ever earned, and it was meaningless, a sour reward, the words of a man groping desperately for hope. Ivor's grudging praise had suited him far better.

  Psyke yelped, and Janus narrowed his eyes at the guard hauling her to her feet. “Watch your grip,” he snapped. “The lady is not used to rough handling.”

  Rue intervened, drawing her up gently, though her body swayed and buckled at the knees.

  “Downey, Miles, aid Lady Last, to Sir Robert's offices.” Rue passed her over to the guards who hastily holstered their pistols. Psyke had given over to weeping; though Janus, watching her flushed and shocked face, thought the tears equal parts dismay and rage. He shared that sensation. Aris's death changed everything.

  Janus had depended on Aris's surviving months yet, if not years, granting Janus the time to convince the king that Janus's plans for Antyre's improvement were sound, that Janus could slip them from the Itarusine noose without bringing them to war again.

  Damn Ivor and his games—

  “My Lord Last, if you will follow her and wait for me. Tell Sir Robert what's occurred. We'll be bringing His Majesty with us.”

  Janus watched Rue remove his cloak, lay it out, and, with another guard's aid, shift Aris's corpse onto the blue cloth.

  “My lord,” Rue said, rising and catching sight of Janus still there. “Your lady awaits you.” There were hard glints in his eyes, either suspicion or anger, and Janus shook himself. No need to make an enemy of Rue, not over this. Not when Psyke seemed to be enemy enough in her own right.

  Murderer, she had called him.

  Janus nodded his acknowledgment of Rue's command—it was nothing less, no matter how it was couched—and set off for the physician's offices, unsurprised to find a handful of guards falling in behind him.

  THE PHYSICIAN'S OFFICES CONSISTED OF two outer rooms—the cluttered apothecary where Sir Robert saw the servants who fell ill and a rarely used surgery—and the man's personal quarters beyond. The guards, after depositing a nearly limp Psyke on the chaise, found themselves jigging in an attempt to avoid oversetting the workbench, jostling Psyke, or interfering with the entrance of Janus and his entourage. Sir Robert was standing perfectly still in the midst of chaos, his nightshirt peeking out beneath his frock
coat. “The king, dead?” He said it as if he had said it several times before, and with as little recognition of the fact.

  “Yes,” Janus said.

  At the sight of him, Psyke began shouting again, a muddled slur of words half in Antyrrian, half in a language Janus didn't understand, though he caught their gist. Murderer.

  He stepped aside for Rue and the grisly bundle clenched taut between two straining guards. The gray wool had darkened, and at the lowermost point blood strained through the dense cloth.

  Sir Robert woke to action at the sight. “Bring him in here,” he said, gesturing to the surgery chamber. “At once.”

  “There's nothing to be done for him,” the gray-bearded guard said. The man, red smeared to the wrist, glared at Janus. Here at least was one who took Psyke's raving to heart.

  “There's cleansing to be done, then,” Sir Robert said, “his body made presentable.”

  “There's information to be gathered,” Rue said, nearly at the same moment.

  Sir Robert's face paled at the reminder that this was no dreadful accident but regicide.

  “My lord, you'll wait?” Rue said while the physician summoned his assistants out of slumber and into nightmare. His apprentice, a sleepy-eyed, stubble-faced youth, was dispatched to tend to Psyke.

  Janus nodded once, holding Rue's gaze with his own. Rue needn't worry. As much as Janus wanted to storm the old wing, shake the truth from Ivor, and then kill him, he knew that could wait. Ivor, ever confident, would wait, enjoying the chaos he'd created.

  Psyke's sobbing breaths gave way to another shriek. Janus, nerves on edge, jumped, hand flying to his borrowed pistol. The remaining guards put their hands over their weapons.

  Rue, about to close the inner door, said, “Lord Last, will you spare my guards' feelings and let them hold your weapon?”

  “No,” Janus said. “Not when the king has been killed. Not when there might be a plot against the entire royal family.” The pistol wasn't much, when all was said and done, not if the guards chose to heed Psyke's words and execute him on the spot. A pistol gave him one shot only, enough to kill the first guard, perhaps seize his sword…. Janus had done lethal damage with less in the Relicts.

  Rue made no reply but closed the door behind him.

  Psyke, proving she had been heeding Janus's words, gasped, gained coherence. “Adiran! Who's watching the prince?” The vivid panic in her eyes faded to a more normal terror.

  “Captain Rue sent another squad to guard the prince,” the bearded kingsguard said. “And the dogs are there.” He had taken advantage of the basin the physician's apprentice had brought and was cleaning the blood from his hands. Despite the confidence in his voice, his hands shook.

  “It won't be enough,” Psyke said, “not against him.” Her hand darted out, lightning fast, and slapped the apprentice as he bent over her arm. The thin metal lancet rang across the stones, came to rest at Janus's feet.

  The apprentice, his hand still tight on Psyke's wrist, said, “You're hysterical….”

  “And there's been enough blood spilled tonight without shedding mine,” she snapped. She jerked in his grip, but he held fast.

  “My lord,” he entreated. “Aid me?”

  Janus met Psyke's eyes, and the shivering calmness in her gaze fractured into near madness again. “I think not. Bleeding is an unclean practice. I'll have none of it. Give her a potion instead.”

  “Poison instead, you mean,” Psyke spat. “Silence the only witness to your crime.”

  The apprentice ducked his head, pretending he hadn't heard the Countess of Last accusing her husband of treason, and bent to mixing a posset for her.

  Rue, coming out of the inner room with a face white and set, knelt before her. “Psyke,” he said, and the presumption of her given name on his lips drew her attention. “Psyke,” Rue said again, and Janus belatedly recalled the rumors that said Rue had once courted her but, having no fortune and no future, been turned away.

  “Ask her your questions if you must, though her mind seems to be wandering through impossibilities,” Janus said. “Either way, stop making eyes at her.”

  Phlegmatic Rue blushed, a red stain there and gone.

  The door to the hall opened, bringing in the king's other counselors, the financier Warrick Bull and Admiral Hector DeGuerre, distress in duplicate.

  Rue held up a hand, forestalling their agitated questions with a series of grim answers. “The king is dead. Murdered. In the old chapel. The assassin escaped but not without witness.”

  “Witness?” DeGuerre asked. His eyes lit on Janus, surrounded by wary guards, hand still resting close to his pistol, and said, “Who?”

  Bull, quicker on the uptake, or less blind to women, joined Rue at Psyke's side. “Is it true, Lady Last? Did you see who was to blame?”

  Psyke nodded, her lips quivering. Her voice was composed, though her hands, still bloodstained, wound round each other like serpents. “Janus,” she said. “My husband, the Earl of Last.”

  The resultant hush was broken by DeGuerre turning on Janus with the full force of a one-time admiral on battle-strewn seas. “Then why stands he here? Guards! Seize—”

  “No,” Janus said. His eyes were all for his wife, for the strange light in her eyes, the way she huddled in on herself. “She's mistaken. Or maddened by this death, one piled upon others in a single year. Her mother, her sisters, her friends—all dead at mad Mirabile's hands.”

  “I am not mad,” Psyke said. “I know what I saw.”

  Bull said more temperately, “Will you tell us where you spent the evening, my lord? We require facts and not speculation.”

  “I played cards with Prince Ivor Sofia Grigor—”

  “With our country's enemy? Do you have witnesses to this? Or should we presume the prince aided you? He claims friendship with you, does he not?” DeGuerre said.

  “Two witnesses, actually,” Janus said. He inclined his head briefly toward Bull, whose expression had eased at Janus's quick answer. “Blythe graced us with his presence, and I'm afraid we lightened his purse for his pains.”

  DeGuerre growled. “Games at a time like this?” He crossed the room, content that he had scored a point, and stood beside Psyke, arms folded.

  Bull said, “Blythe is easily led. His words will lend no real weight to Last's claim.”

  “Then it's as well that our game was interrupted by the Duchess of Love,” Janus said, aware of Rue's attention. He let his lips curl in a sneer. “She chose to stop in and treat us all to a lecture on gaming, the nature of rats, and the king's notoriously soft heart.”

  Psyke whimpered, her hand clapped over her mouth, leaving dark smudges on her pallid cheeks. DeGuerre's hand fell protectively on Psyke's shoulder, and she flinched; the long rip in her sleeve that the apprentice had made preparatory to bleeding her parted, exposing a deep bruise spreading over her shoulder. “You're injured,” DeGuerre said, gesturing to the apprentice.

  The boy brought the posset over. It sloshed in his nervous hands and the scent of adulterated wine temporarily overlaid the heavy tang of blood in the air. Psyke pushed it away. “I won't take it. Not with him here.”

  “Send for them both,” Bull said, “Lord Blythe and the Duchess of Love.”

  The inner door opened, and the physician stepped out, borne on a waft of blood and alcohol. “My lords,” he said.

  Rue said, “You've examined the body, Sir Robert?”

  “I have,” the physician said. He took in his apprentice, still hovering over Psyke with the posset in his hand, and said, “Be gone with you, lad.”

  The boy set down the cup, dropped a grateful bow toward his master, a more nervous series of head bobs toward the rest of the party, and fled.

  DeGuerre took Psyke's hands in his. “She's chilled through. Need she remain?”

  Such solicitude, Janus thought, for a woman who told such wide-eyed lies. The very picture of innocent grief and pain. He admired the theatrics, even as he worried about the results of her
playacting.

  “For the moment, yes,” Rue said. “Your examination?”

  Sir Robert looked at Psyke, and she raised her head to meet his eyes with weary contempt. “I saw it done, sir, I am not like to quail over the retelling of it. He was shot and then worked over with a blade. A thick blade.”

  “Gut shot at close range,” Sir Robert said, “followed by saber. A foreigner's choice of weapon.”

  “No foreigner did this,” Psyke said. She darted her gaze up toward Janus, and the open blueness of her eyes, the fear and pain, the bewildered betrayal in them confused him. Was this acting? If so, it was of a caliber to match the grandes dames of the stage.

  The guards brought in Lord Blythe; the young man looked both furious and scared, full of fading bluster. Behind him, the Duchess of Love came in like mourning itself, draped in black bombazine and her jet-crystal gloves.

  “King Aris is dead, they tell me,” she said. “Is this true? Is Antyre without its king?”

  “It is,” Rue said. “Will you attest to—”

  “Last claims innocence,” DeGuerre said, interrupting, “though his wife claims otherwise. Last says you and Blythe will vouch for him.”

  Celeste Lovesy's lips tightened. She said nothing. Blythe coughed, and when all eyes turned upon him, he fell silent after another glance at the duchess. Her gloved hand fell heavily on his arm.

  Warrick Bull narrowed his eyes. “Speak up, and speak truly. Were you playing cards with the Itarusine prince and Last?”

  “Yes,” Lord Blythe said, though the single syllable was grudgingly given. Janus felt a relief of tension he hadn't realized he bore. “From after dinner until the bells rang.”

  The duchess, when pressured, admitted that she had found both Blythe and Janus in Ivor's company with every appearance of having been there for some time. The words were dragged out in poisonous short phrases. Yes, she had seen him. Yes, there were glasses aplenty laid out, and most of a bottle of brandy gone. Yes, there were coins, both Antyrrian and Itarusine, piled up as if several games had been won and lost.