Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  “Harm,” Janus said. “He was behind this?”

  Delight nodded, looking down at the teacup, his burned braid sliding perilously close to the surface, adding the taste of char to an already unpalatable drink. “Four of them,” Delight said. “With Chryses's body between them. Two were Antyrrian bullyboys. The other two were Itarusine. The one who killed Chry was Itarusine.”

  “You know this for certain?” Gost said at the same moment DeGuerre growled something ugly under his breath.

  “They spoke Itarusine,” Delight said. “Not something you'll find your average man doing.” He clutched the teacup in his hands, burned fingers bleeding on the pale china.

  Gost spoke into the quiet, his voice so poisonously reasonable. “You were in some distress, surely you were mistaken. Itarusine thugs within our shores? Murdering aristocrats? Even disgraced ones? It seems more likely your argumentative brother quarreled with a man equally hot-tempered—Harm is reputedly foul-mannered—and it followed him home.”

  “You've always over-dramatized yourself,” DeGuerre muttered. “Why else still wear—”

  Delight closed his eyes against the weight of their disbelief. Janus thought them not so much skeptical as afraid.

  “Whatever they're planning,” Delight said when the silence had returned, “they're starting it now. Harm's no longer content to wait for commands. He's gotten them.”

  Janus felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Behind him the open doorway felt suddenly populated.

  Psyke peered in at the frozen tableau they made. As she entered the room, the trees outside quaked with the violence of fleeing rooks.

  Gost and Bull made way for her, perhaps out of courtesy, perhaps out of that same uncanny sense that Janus was prey to: that it wasn't the sound of argument that had brought her to the door but the aura of death.

  “Dionyses,” she said, surprise and pleasure warming her voice. “Are you—You're not well.” She rounded on them all. “And you are simply watching, waiting? For what? Him to fall into shock from his injuries?”

  “Countess,” Gost said, “once he tells us what happened—”

  She cocked her head, hesitated for a moment, and then said, “Chryses is dead, murdered by Nikos the Ax, when he tried to race them to the front gate, to protect Dionyses. Seahook is in ruins. And my husband's engines destroyed but thankfully not in Harm's hands. Now you know. Begone with you.”

  Janus drew in a steady breath. She'd grown careless with what ailed her: not madness but possession. As he thought it, he shivered, aware of her shadow, nearly a separate thing from her, seeming to shift to gaze on him.

  Gost's attention sharpened. Despite his usual dismissal of women's words, he hesitated.

  “You won't go?” Psyke asked. “Very well.” She gained Delight's side and drew him to his feet. “We'll remove ourselves.”

  Janus ceded her the field. Why not? He had found out what he needed to know and even grieving and injured, Delight was too rational to be swayed by the duchess's hand-me-down prejudices against Janus.

  He turned, interrupting the low-voiced conference between Bull and Gost, Psyke's name on their lips. DeGuerre stared at them both, glassy-eyed and silent, his hands clenched at his sides.

  “Bull,” Janus said, “set the Particulars on Harm. We've left that serpent loose long enough.”

  “The charge?” Gost said. “Only hearsay from a man who thinks himself a woman, and a woman who collects gossip on the wind itself.”

  “Yes,” Bull agreed, ignoring Gost. “It's well past time to round up the antimachinists. If they've attacked houses, whether at the behest of Itarusine agitators or not, they've become far too dangerous to ignore. At the very least, our attentions might serve to distract Harm from his schemes.”

  Janus felt a double serving of triumph at that; Bull agreed with him. Even though it was a small and obvious thing, a first agreement made the next more likely. By the faint pinch to his lips, Gost knew it, too.

  Gost, Janus thought, had listened overmuch to his own reputation and believed it all. He was a clever man, an agile manipulator, but he overstepped. Ivor and Adiran were threat enough for the throne. Janus wouldn't tolerate another. Though Janus had meant to concentrate his efforts on thwarting Ivor, he would make time to remove Fanshawe Gost.

  ♦ 20 ♦

  ELIGHT WOKE TO THE SLOW, golden light of late afternoon filtering through the inner bed curtains. His bandaged hands snagged on the bedclothes, and he winced, both for the damage he must be causing and for the pain it triggered.

  He shifted and the scent of soot and loss ambushed him. He put his hands, bulky but soft in their windings, over his eyes, curled around the pain, his breath ragged. Chryses was gone. He was alone.

  A soft hand touched his shoulder, stroked his hair; a weight settled on the bed. He tensed; he didn't want tenderness now.

  He shuddered and she drew away; her scent lingered a moment, sweetness underlaid with something sharp, cold, and strong enough to penetrate even the rankness of soot, old sweat, and blood.

  It made the hairs on his arms rise, painful tugs against flame-washed flesh. He couldn't hear her breathing; once she had moved away, she might as well have vanished, if she had even been here at all.

  He bared his face, let his hands fall, and blinking, picked her out, a shadow in the sunlight. “Psyke,” he said. Her quarters, he decided, taking in the sweep of feminine surroundings. Her bed.

  He fought his way out of the piled linens. “Gently,” she said. “Sir Robert fed you Laudable. You've been sleeping for two days. You're like to be stiff.”

  “Chryses is dead,” he said. “Murdered. My aches are nothing to that.” He leaned forward and covered his face again. She fell back to that strange, brooding silence, so unlike the girl he had known, inquisitive and attentive to everyone around her.

  Delight rose, limbs aching and stinging, head spinning; he seized the bedpost and swayed, watching the shreds of his petticoat and skirt sway also. Psyke took a step closer, reaching out as if she meant to steady him, but then recoiled.

  Delight felt stung, his feelings ridiculously injured over that small rejection from a woman he considered a friend, then he saw the expression on her face and knew whatever her difficulty was, it had nothing to do with rejection.

  “Ring for the maid,” he said. “I'll need clothes.” The skirts hardly mattered anymore; he had worn them as long as he had to offend the admiral. He had bigger priorities now.

  “You need to—”

  “I need to work,” Delight said. “Janus—”

  “He's responsible for Chryses's death, sent him into danger. How can you—”

  “The antimachinists are to blame,” Delight said, “not Janus. He only wants the best for this country.”

  “So he says,” Psyke said. The voice wasn't her own; a commoner's cadence overlaid her diction. The pallor of her face changed to a blush of rage, rare in his memories of sweet-natured Psyke. It shook his careful focus, let him feel something beyond repressed grief and blind determination.

  Delight fumbled to the delicate chair before Psyke's dressing table, and sat heavily in it. The wood creaked alarmingly, but after all the time spent in the decaying surrounds of Seahook, the sound soothed his jangled nerves. “You don't believe him?” He unwound his bandages to better assess the damage. Blisters and red swollen skin. He'd heal.

  Sweet-voiced again, she said, “Challacombe reminds me of the palace proverb: Janus profits when men die. History defines him as a self-involved killer, hardly the mark of a man who should be in power.” Psyke settled down on the bed he had risen from, her bare feet dangling like a child's. But even as a hoydenish child, her skin had never showed the kind of dirt her soles revealed now.

  It reminded him that years could turn a friend into a stranger. He would step carefully in his speech, at least until he could assess this Psyke who seemed overburdened with bitterness and despair.

  “What does the duchess offer you?” he asked i
nstead. Hadn't he heard Janus bemoan his wife's unsavory association often enough?

  Psyke looked away, fingers worrying at a spot of soot on her sheets.

  “Is it some oblique revenge?” he pressed. “Does the duchess promise you satisfaction for your murdered mother? Your sisters? For Aris? Vengeance is a poor way to rule a country.”

  “And murder is better?” she asked.

  “What happens if the duchess succeeds in killing Janus? Who will step into Janus's place? Who will lead us?”

  “There's no shortage of killers,” Psyke said, “if you're partial to such.”

  Delight threw a bottle of scent at her. Psyke ducked her head, let the bottle disappear into the linens without damage.

  “Childish,” she said.

  “Only in response to someone who refuses to even listen,” he said. “I am not denying Janus can be a dangerous man. But this is a time for dangerous leaders.”

  “Danger begets danger. Your actions at the docks brought us closer to destruction than decades of infighting has. Adiran is the rightful heir,” Psyke said. “The duchess will raise him, and in the interim your father and Blythe will continue as joint regents—” Her words seemed rote, something learned but not felt.

  “And your chosen role? Why do you not seek the regency yourself? You and Janus together—”

  “I'm tainted,” she said. It was the first thing she had said to him that felt real. “I believe my reputation grows worse than yours, Dionyses. Or haven't you heard it in the streets yet? They call me the countess of death.”

  “You know how little fondness I have for the scandal sheets. What have you done that could merit such an insult?”

  She drew her knees up to her chest, hugged them close, inadvertently baring white ankles and calves, before her skirt hid them again. Delight frowned, registering again the strangeness in the air. It was simple silence: an empty room when the Countess of Last should always be attended.

  Silence in her movements when there should have been the rustle of layers over corsets and boning and lacy petticoats. The loose spill of her hair, unpinned and tangled. The flowers on her tables were withered; her dressing table was dusty. In the midst of the palace, Psyke lived like a leper.

  “Janus allows them to treat you so?”

  “My knight,” she said, sad amusement warming the thin thread of her voice, “ever defending me from nannies, governesses, and bullies. Even now, with all you've lost, you're prepared to demand a reckoning. But my future is death and the palace reflects it.”

  Delight gaped, fumbling for words before he decided words were perhaps not what the situation needed. He rose, nearly tripping over the dirty remains of a tea tray, and took Psyke by the shoulders, shaking her gently until she buckled into his arms and cried.

  Her body trembled against his, and it woke every lurking ache in his body; the burns felt as if they bloomed anew over his hands. Her loose hair snagged on his bandages and he pulled back, dismayed at the resurgence of pain—more, at the worsening of it.

  His skin had been blistered and tender as if he had fallen asleep in the sun, but now… his palms cracked and bled while the rest of his skin grew clammy with fever sweat.

  Psyke jerked away, retreating to the other side of the room, and the shadows there. He blotted his bleeding hands on undoubtedly expensive lengths of creamy lace, and went toward her.

  She stepped back. “Have a care, Dionyses. My poor maid, Dahlia, always a sickly sort, found service to me a fatal burden. If you have a weakness, I will winkle it out and worsen it.”

  “Psyke,” he said, “if your maid died, it was no fault of yours—”

  Psyke's hands busied themselves at her bodice, unfastening the laces there. “You have studied human flesh, know the ways of it, the ailments it is prone to. But tell me, Delight, if it's not Death that has touched me, what is it?” She let her dress fall, turned as she did, so his startled gaze only collected a white curve of breast, a sinuous twist to her spine, before she caught the gown at her waist.

  He swallowed, belatedly hoping her rooms were as abandoned as they seemed. His reputation was such that a charge of adultery wouldn't damage it any further, but Janus was his patron and Psyke, his wife….

  “Do you see?” She stamped a bare foot, hard enough that he winced at the impact of flesh against stone, though she seemed unaffected. “Tell me what has befallen me.”

  He stepped closer, warily; a day ago, he understood the world and his place in it—Janus's engineer, Chryses's twin, the reclusive dweller at Seahook, and occasional liaison to a privateer. This, this was as new and as peculiar as a dream, where nothing made sense but felt full of import. “Step out of the shadows,” he said. A strange reluctance roused in him.

  “I live in shadow,” she said, peering over her shoulder at him. Nonetheless, she obediently took a step back.

  Even in the heart of the room, in the generous sunlight, her skin held inky shadows. Mourning cloth, he thought, badly dyed, and leaving its mark. Not an uncommon sight, but perhaps her mind had worked on it, created strange fears and fancies abetted by the aura of despair in the palace.

  “Do you see?” she repeated. She shifted uncomfortably, her modesty warring with this need for his judgment. The shadows on her skin… Sudden rage roused in him: not dye but something more akin to bruises, layers of black and yellow and green. New over old. Had Janus beaten her?

  He squinted, took another step closer; the marks were slightly raised, slightly glossy. He moved closer still, until her spine, sweetly undulant, filled his vision. He reached out, ran a gentle finger up from the small of her back to her nape.

  He pressed her head gently forward, brushed her hair out of the way, and saw. There were scales disrupting the smooth pallor of her skin, blackest at the crests of her shoulders, branching out, growing translucent as they spread, until he could find them only by their sleek texture.

  “When I was a child and full of questions,” she said, drawing her gown back into place, “I always went to you and Chryses. Will you aid me now?” She turned, drifted soundlessly across the floor, to sit in the window seat.

  “Aid you?” he asked.

  “He speaks to me, on rare occasion, but His voice is so great and my understanding so small, it becomes as meaningless as the sound of the tide. Will you aid me? Now that you have seen?”

  “He?” Delight parroted, thinking of strange and exotic diseases mentioned in the texts the scholars wrote after visiting foreign climes. Perhaps, some sailor-spread malady carried into the palace on imported cloth …

  “Haith,” she said. “Haith.”

  Delight let out a breath of dismay. This was madness, the unpalatable result of a diet of murder, pain, and family history that claimed allegiance with the god. No wonder Janus had asked for tracts on the gods. He needed to understand Psyke's illness.

  “You don't believe me,” she said. She folded into herself, rested her head on the jut of her knee as if she were too weary to keep it raised. “I am the last of the Redoubts, the last of the line that He raised to prominence. Is it so remarkable that the god of death would wish to see something end?” Her voice flattened, lost all warmth, all hope.

  Delight heard footsteps in the corridor, a soft shuff of palace shoes on thick carpeting, and prayed for interruption, no matter the damage to his reputation.

  “Your observations fail you, Delight. You choose not to see. Others know the truth, either intuited or reasoned out. The duchess, Adiran, Ivor, even Janus. Oh, Janus knows best of all what I carry with me.”

  She slipped from the window seat like a spill of silk; her hands wrapped about his forearm, claws cold and taut. “Their voices grow greater in number every day; do you know how it galls to use Mirabile's deathless spite to keep the others away? But their voices swell and I—

  “Help me,” she pled, once she had regained control of her voice. She turned her hands on each other, knotted her fingers. “Our families were friendly once. We played together as chil
dren….”

  Before he was forced to answer, Janus's page entered, his small frame burdened with a double armful of clothes. Psyke took the opportunity to slip away; Evan looked after her, thrust the clothes into Delight's hastily raised arms. “Milord Last's in the king's study,” he said. “Meet him there.” Without waiting for a response, the boy turned and hastened off in the same direction Psyke had taken.

  Janus knows, she had said. With his page tracking her like a small, determined hound it was no wonder she took it for confirmation of Janus's belief.

  Delight turned to the piles of clothes and spread them out alongside the bed. Two separate outfits lay before him. One was akin to his usual wear: thick-woven woolen skirts and blouse, awkward to move in but quite sturdy in the surrounds of chemicals and reluctant to burn; the other was men's clothes fit for a day at Parliament. Sober in color and cut, wool also, but of a fineness he hadn't felt in years. He ran a finger down the breeches, admired the simplicity of the lines, the crispness of the black wool, the brightness of the white, the flare of blue in the waistcoat; these came from Last's closet, without a doubt, would be a quiet shield against naysayers unhappy with his return to court.

  Delight licked his lips, unaccountably nervous with having a choice presented to him. He missed Seahook, the certainties of the day there, even as he reached for the pants. Janus would have another laboratory set up soon, its focus shifted now from creation to defense. With the Itarusine ships closing in, the privateers became more than smugglers: They became their first and perhaps only line of defense. They would need more cannon and shot, and made quickly. If Antyre meant to drive back the Itarusines, it would have to be soon.

  “DIONYSES DEGUERRE,” THE GUARD SAID, ushering him into the study. Janus looked up from his narrow focus on the letters spread across the table, and had to blink Delight into clarity. Perhaps he should ask Delight to make him a pair of spectacles, if the reading could blur his vision. Or perhaps he had simply been awake too long. The past two days had left him with little recourse.