Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  “Too soon,” Janus said. He needed time. Time for the plague to spread, time to make the city unwelcoming, time to prove that Ivor had killed Aris.

  “Tarrant will harry them,” Delight said. Janus leaped away from the spyglass, heart hammering at the man's near-silent approach. Back to his skirts today. DeGuerre must have irritated him again.

  “Jumpy,” Delight said. “But I heard you killed a prince today. I suppose I'd be a trifle nervy also.”

  “Tarrant,” Janus said.

  “He sends me a message,” Delight said, pulling out a scrap of paper from one of the voluminous pockets sewn into his skirts.

  “He is a clever man,” Delight said, smiling a little. “Clever enough to find a way ashore when the Itarusine fleet rings us, more clever still to find me in the palace.”

  “He came himself?”

  “Sent a sailor,” Delight said. “One who was wounded and no longer fit for piracy. Tarrant thinks he can delay the Bear one full day, perhaps two.”

  Janus calculated. Still not enough time for the plague to be a genuine force. But enough to pretend. “Delight, I need large signal flags made.”

  “Flags are rarely useful in land-to-sea communication,” Delight said. “Sea fogs and wave reflections—”

  “Plague flags,” Janus said. “I want them flying from every rooftop. I want the Itarusine sailors feared to take a single step ashore.”

  “Plague?” Delight asked. He swallowed. “A bluff?”

  “No,” Janus said. He turned to look over the edge of the roof again, this time not out to the sea, to the avowed enemy, but to the crowded streets spiderwebbing away from the palace. “Murne suffers from a rat's tangle of dilemmas. Too much of our profits go to Itarus. Too many people are unemployed. Too many people starve. Until we've redone or cast off the treaty with Itarus, there can be no resolution. But even with it gone, there will be too many people. Problems cannot resolve themselves like a candle being blown out. Rather, they smolder and recur.

  “We have too many people? We have too many unemployed? Plague is as good a way to winnow the chaff as any. The weakest will die first,” Janus said. “The strong will survive, and there will be jobs aplenty burning and burying the dead. The aristocratic lines that die—their estates will revert to the crown and replenish our coffers.”

  “That's madness,” Rue said. “You could not have done this deliberately….”

  “I can, and have done,” Janus said. “But, remember, Rue, you chose to follow me. If you have doubts, only ask yourself, would Black-Winged Ani treat our people any better?”

  ♦ 25 ♦

  SYKE WATCHED HER NEW MAIDS flutter about her rooms in a smothering cloud of black cloth, their faces drawn. The duchess had trained them well enough that Psyke need say nothing, only sit like a sculpture while they set right the neglect that had been slowly eroding the gentility of her days, made it all too easy to be lost in the strangeness of having other voices in her mind. With each plumped pillow, each dusted shelf, each dress shaken out and ironed, Psyke felt more herself, the Countess of Last, and less a vessel for the dead.

  Perhaps not a sculpture of a woman, she mused, but a spider at the heart of her web. She waited patiently and was rewarded, as night drew in, as the other maids sought out the evening chores, by a single maid coming in to dress her for dinner. The girl was tall, slim, and kept her face downcast, her hair arranged in an improbable Kyrdic fashion.

  “I suppose the long fringe hides the eye patch,” Psyke said, and the woman stopped pretending. She sat sideways on the chair before the dressing table, facing Psyke.

  “You expected me.”

  Psyke felt a surge of indignation touch her, and it took her a moment to realize the outrage was her own. She reined it back, and said, “Where else would you go when Prince Ivor is no shelter any longer? His rooms scrutinized, and you so ardently sought on the streets. Judging by your accent, you're a long way from home. The Explorations?”

  “I have no home,” she said. “Nor name. That much is true. Also true: I can aid you… teach you how to resist the gifts of the god or to use them. If you shelter me. If I'm found, then Ivor will be disgraced or killed. I would not cause him hurt.”

  “You killed Aris,” Psyke said, and the woman fell silent, as if she had forgotten that death lay between them.

  The girl collected Psyke's face brush, spun it in her fingers, transferring a dusting of powder to her nails. She wiped her fingers on her gown, leaving ghostly streaks against the black.

  “You offer me nothing of use,” Psyke said. “Knowledge I have already gained, and your bargain benefits only you. If you wish me to keep you from the gallows, to keep Ivor safe behind his shield of privilege, I need something more.”

  The girl gnawed her lip, denting its full red with white teeth, feral yet determined. “I can help you with Black-Winged Ani,” she said. Her voice flatted out, all musicality stripped bare by evident fear.

  “How?” Psyke asked. All her ghosts were in concert in the question, though the tones were different. Mirabile, drifting about the room in a cloud of pale feathers, roused to scornful fury in a heartbeat. Challacombe pressed forward in a puff of smoke; and Aris, pallid, wraithlike Aris, remembered he had once been a scholar and took an interest.

  “I know what drives Her—”

  “As do we all,” Psyke said. “Love and vengeance.”

  “In the abstract, yes.” The girl brushed her hair out of her face, knotted her fingers in the dark tangles. “In the specific? Do you know that—what She wants?”

  Mirabile assayed a cool breath in Psyke's ear. She gives herself airs.

  “So what does Ani desire, then?”

  The girl smiled, flashing charming dimples entirely at odds with the thick black cord and solid leather of her eye patch. “Can't share all my secrets right away. Find me a safe harbor, and I'll be at your beck and call.”

  Psyke said, “I think I'll keep you at my side. I need a lady-in-waiting.”

  The girl's jaw firmed, arrogance in her face. “I can't stay here. It would be remarked upon.” Her tones were barely civil, and Psyke smiled. Even without a mirror, she knew her smile was Mirabile's cruel one. It might be Mirabile's inspiration that fed sly tidbits of petty viciousness into her mind, but the intent was all Psyke's.

  “A servant,” Psyke said, “is invisible.” She'd seen how the girl had bridled when the duchess ordered her to a task. “All servants are, even one so distinctively marred as you. For you to be recognized or discovered, first someone would have to want to look. But servants are nothing and no one looks. I'm sure your beloved Prince Ivor counted on that.”

  The girl's hands scrabbled aimlessly among the detritus on the dressing table, knocking aside perfume, eyeblack, plucking pale hairs fitfully from Psyke's brush. “I'm his lover,” she said. “The only one he trusts.”

  Psyke let her silence answer for her, after the girl's protests died away. “Feel gratitude and loyalty to him, if you must,” she said, “but don't confuse your emotions with his. There's advice for you and more useful than anything you've offered me.”

  The girl hurled the brush at her; Psyke ducked. It hit the wall, denting the plaster.

  “I had seven sisters,” Psyke said, “including one brat who was the despair of six governesses and four nurserymaids. Tantrums do not disturb me. Recalcitrance does. You've made your offer and I've made mine. Have you any objections?”

  The girl was too long used to being masked or veiled; her expressions shifted like clear water, every emotion evident. For all her intelligence, Ivor's little assassin was remarkably naïve. A wiser woman would have understood that Ivor was sacrosanct, no matter his actions. A wiser woman would have fled the country when the duchess was arrested. Or, at the least, met Ivor's allies in Murne, not made this desperate attempt to stay near him.

  “Won't you be frightened to have an assassin at your back?” the girl said.

  “Aren't you frightened to serve the countess of d
eath?” Psyke countered.

  The girl rose, paced the room. “I prefer to live. To return to Itarus with my prince. But death would free me from a danger you can only begin to imagine.”

  “If that's the case, I will oblige you,” Janus said, appearing in the doorway like a specter. There was blood on his sleeve and blood in his eyes. A moment later, his blade was in his hand, and then at the assassin's throat.

  Psyke said, “Janus, no!”

  JANUS WONDERED WHEN HE HAD become so accustomed to his wife speaking to ghosts that he was startled to find someone responding to her voice. Startlement gave way to quick disbelief and finally rage as he overheard enough to identify the speaker; Ivor's girl, Ivor's assassin.

  He backed the maid against the wall, her eye wide and panicky. Psyke's protest was a mouse squeak to a cat, only furthering his predatory instinct.

  The girl slid a dagger from her skirt, snaked it upward in an underhand blow meant to split his belly and spill his intestines. He twisted, heard the steel rasp against the buttons on his waistcoat, and tried to grasp her wrist with his left hand. He delayed the second blow before his hand failed him, and she used the moment not to strike again but to duck away from the blade near her throat.

  That decision told Janus all he needed to know. She might have had training—he imagined that under her gown, her skin was as marred as his from Ivor's blades—but she lacked understanding of battle. It would have been better by far to risk his blade for the certainty of a strike while he was weak. As it was, she darted away from him. He lunged forward, stepped deliberately on the black trail of her hem; and, when she sprawled, brought the blade down again.

  Psyke's shove, slight and small though she was, prevented his blade from doing the assassin a fatal injury. The blow meant for her neck skittered upward, gashing her cheek open to the bone and ripping off her eye patch.

  Janus pushed Psyke back, hardly an effort at all, and turned to find the assassin crouched before him, her dagger used to cut her skirt free of his restraining weight. She hissed at him, but her face, beneath the splash of blood, the scarlet ruin of her exposed eye socket, was skull white and terrified.

  Psyke hung on his blade arm with a tenacity that appalled him, wrapping her arms about him as inexorably as a sea siren. “I promised she would live.”

  “As your maid?” he said. He kept a careful eye on the assassin, even while he began the efforts of detangling himself from Psyke. “You tried to kill me when you only thought I had a hand in Aris's death. The actual assassin you choose to spare?”

  “If you kill her,” she said, breath perfectly even in his ear, despite her exertions, “will anyone believe that she was Aris's assassin without her confession?”

  “I won't betray him,” the assassin spat.

  Janus caught sight of Psyke's face and some of his killing rage faded at the expression on it: a cold rage of her own and a healthy dose of contempt.

  “You love him so much, you'll die for him?” Janus asked.

  “I would,” the assassin said, as defiant as a debutante declaring her love for a most unsuitable mate, aware of the romance of it all.

  Janus said, “I tell you, if he had word that we'd captured you—”

  “You haven't,” she said. She sat back, dusting her skirts. “Despite all your men hunting me. I came to you—”

  “—he'd deny you and send a new assassin to kill you without any more thought than he'd give to disposing of a broken weapon.” Disgusted, Janus stalked back through Psyke's sitting room, and flung open the door to the hallway. He startled the two guards on duty, looked them up and down, searching for that dark ribbon about the sword hilt, and when he found it, said, “I've an assassin in my wife's bedroom. Come and remove her.” He gestured to the guards farther down the hallway at his own door, and said, “You two—fetch Rue.”

  After far more roundaboutation than Janus thought his head could bear—where would she be imprisoned now that Delight had spread his mechanics throughout the dungeon? Could they put her in Stones? No, Rue wanted her accessible and the streets were dangerous enough that she might escape them on the way—the guards swept the assassin off to the little-used dowager's tower above Aris's rooms, there to be watched by a rotating complement of kings-guards.

  Psyke sighed once the assassin had been removed, righting small things jostled during the unequal struggle, and drawing Janus's attention.

  “Your maid?” he asked.

  “I thought to keep her close at hand, the better to coax her to turn on Ivor.”

  “Whatever your intentions,” Janus said, “you might be comfortable with a proven assassin at your back. I am not.”

  “Do you think imprisoning her there is wise?” she asked. “Such an unusual cell will garner attention, will reveal her presence to Ivor. He'll see her dead.”

  “It would be less wise to leave her free. We have problems enough in the palace. Delight's spyglasses showed us Grigor's fleet approaching. Its arrival will be a matter of days. Ivor took his confinement too calmly and likely plots ways to free himself. Our best hope is to have your assassin … coaxed into betraying Ivor, so that we might greet Grigor's emissary with proof of the prince's wrongdoing.”

  “You intend to torture her?”

  “I neither know, nor care what Rue intends. Only that he get results,” Janus said.

  “I admit I thought to turn her, but I also doubted my chances. She loves him, will hear no wrong said of him.”

  “Love ends and turns to betrayal more easily than you might think,” Janus said.

  ♦ 26 ♦

  ANUS HAD BEEN ON THE roof of the palace for nearly three hours, watching the incremental progress of the enemy ships, when Evan coughed behind him. The day had been so far remarkably free of interruption. Bull was scouring the city, trying to separate profitable merchants from Itarusine ones. Ivor sent missive after missive from his confinement; it kept the palace pages hopping, intercepting them for study before allowing them onward. So far, the letters had been useless, harmless drivel, designed solely to keep the palace guards busy investigating their recipients. DeGuerre, aggravated past endurance by the new alliance between Bull and Janus, had retreated to his city home, where Poole joined him soon after. And Rue… Rue sought to make the assassin speak.

  “What is it, Evan?”

  “Note. From Rue.” The boy's voice was thin, strained, a casualty of two events in quick succession. The boy had overheard Rue and Delight discussing the spreading plague and Janus's attempt to harness it for his own purpose. When the boy had rushed to Janus's side, breathless and aghast, saying Janus couldn't have, not deliberately, not just to keep the Itarusine fleet away, not when Murne's citizens would suffer first and worst. Had he truly released the plague to keep away the Itarusines?

  When Janus had admitted to that—leaving off his desire to decimate a troublesome population—Evan's pale eyes had clouded over. “My ma,” he said, “my ma was a plague pigeon. And died of it.” Before Janus could decide how best to respond to that, Evan had backed away. “Adiran's probably woken up by now. I'm going to him.”

  Like that, Janus had lost Evan. A careless discussion overheard by a boy whose mother had been a do-gooder with a scented mask. Janus had seen one of them as a child, braving the rubble in the Relicts. The gray-cloaked figure had been unmolested—the adults shying away from the dangerous miasma that might surround the physician, the children wary of the beaked mask that smelled of roses and camphor.

  The plague pigeon had spotted Janus and Miranda, leaning against each other in the shelter of a fallen shop, and stopped. Were they sick? he had asked, a stranger expressing muffled concern from behind a nightmare mask. Were they hungry? He offered bread and cheese wrapped in cloth.

  Miranda and Janus had fled, too wary to reach out, and when they found another, safer viewpoint, they saw a second pigeon chastising the first. “It's the Relicts,” the man said. “There's nothing to be done. Come away from here and help those worth helping.”


  The plague pigeons were walking the streets of Murne again, summoned from their own lives by the flags Delight had unearthed; fabric marked by a densely coiled serpent, glittering blue and green, with an open, fanged mouth. Naga, the god of avarice and health.

  Only in extremity were the gods remembered, Janus thought. Only in extremity were they summoned.

  He peered through the spyglass on the palace roof, shifting it another five degrees. Tarrant's harrying hadn't slowed the icebreaker much; the ship was simply too big to sink, too heavy to stop, and too heavily manned to burn successfully. He'd watched one such attempt, cannons firing, juddering the smaller privateer through the waves, the unheard report of pistol shot and cannonball, none of it enough to pierce the icebreaker's thickened hull. When a sail caught fire, a quick line of traveling crimson and orange, like the sunset, the crew of the Icebear had moved with practice, and extinguished it.

  For a moment, looking at the Icebear churning its inexorable way to Murne's beleaguered shores, he found himself tempted toward prayer. Or to something more active. The streets began to see men dying or dead; no street seemed exempt. Even the noble houses—that had to open their doors to deliveries, to servants, to the plague—had found themselves with their own share of the sick. Surely there was death enough in the city. He thought he might ask Psyke to wake Haith and entreat Him to destroy the Itarusines.

  Hadn't her ancestor bartered with the god for his victory? But Redoubt, for all the god's favor, had ended alone, powerless, lost in his own city, in the heart of his kingdom.

  The gods' bargains, Janus thought, were best left unaccepted. Ani hadn't bettered his life any, for all Maledicte's attempts to channel it so. Last could have been killed without Her aid, and more subtly, without rousing the frenzy of fear and suspicion that had led to Maledicte's fleeing the kingdom. Without Ani, Janus would have Miranda by his side still, a wildly eccentric wife for a nobleman—the image that came to mind, though, wasn't Miranda but Psyke, wandering barefoot and mercurial through his rooms.