Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  As Last's son, as Maledicte's lover, he had been someone, someone scandalous, tinged with danger and the rise to power. With Aris alive, Janus had been a source of wariness in the courtiers and lords who debated his position. But with Aris dead, and so suddenly, the only respect Janus gathered was the respect granted a killer who looked to be escaping the noose.

  But who had sent the assassins? Blythe disliked him enough to see him dead, but the fop couldn't suborn a paid whore, much less a member of the Kingsguard. Bull, who owned the guards, was an easy answer; but if Bull wanted Janus dead, his guards would have appeared with trumped-up excuses and a writ of execution. The Duchess of Love or Harm still were the most likely suspects.

  Psyke roused all at once; she scrambled from the bed in wary silence at still finding him in her quarters. She disappeared into her dressing room, discreetly tucked behind another narrow drape.

  A vase teetered, rocked by her passing, and Janus stilled it, wrinkling his nose at the cut flowers gone rank. In the hallway, two maids spoke in low voices, moving from room to room, bringing fresh water and linens. Janus thrust open the door, startled them to silence, and handed the nearer one the vase. “Dispose of those, and find Dahlia. Her lady is waiting her.”

  “Dahlia's ill,” the maid said, her shoulders touching the stone behind her as she stepped back.

  “Then find a replacement,” Janus said, and shut the door firmly. Dahlia was hopeless. Dahlia had allowed Psyke to creep out and meet Aris secretly. Too young; too callow; and, worse than both of those, too stupid. Janus despised stupidity; everything else could be taught. Still, it was intriguing. If Dahlia was ill, perhaps Psyke's assertions were more than delusion.

  One of the religious tracts had mentioned illnesses accumulating about Haith's avatar, a collective of death. Janus had taken it for hyperbole, but perhaps it was based in truth; his wife surrounded by the dead.

  Psyke burst into rapid speech, shrill, a little frightened. “It wasn't my fault, Marchand. My hand on the pistol, but his guidance. And you were hardly blameless. Assassination's a chancy thing, and death can be dealt either direction.” She paused as if listening to a response; Janus drew in a careful breath, understanding that Psyke thought the shut door had heralded his departure.

  His wife talked to herself, spoke sometimes in her sleep; he had known so, but this—this tasted of madness. Or something more. A collective of death? Janus crept closer.

  “It's all very well for you to say, but it's still treason. There is, after all, a good deal of difference between proof and punishment. Assassination is not the same as execution, and you know that. You swore an oath to protect. You violated it for a promise of coin from a dubious source, and, worse still—”

  Splashes sounded, the quick tide of someone washing her hands and face in jerky movements. “Worse still,” she hissed, “you admit you took money to cloak another assassin in Kingsguard colors, money that might as well have been stamped with the Itarusine glacier. The money, the weapon, the direction … all from that Itarusine agitator whose name is too aptly chosen to be anything but deliberate mockery.”

  “Harm, the antimachinist, paid Marchand to kill me?” Janus said, and there came a crash, as if the water basin had been knocked over.

  Psyke whirled, pulled the curtain back to gape at him, standing in the dressing room doorway.

  “Don't go silent now,” Janus said. “I found your words most illuminating, even if your source is suspect.”

  She tilted her chin, drew her water-spattered nightgown about her, and brushed past him. He caught her arm. “Psyke.”

  “What would you have me say? That Marchand was so offended by his untimely demise that he came to file a complaint like some petulant customer?” Her tone was offensive, and Janus smiled. So like Mal, cloaking truth with audacity and rudeness. His smile faded—her words cloaked with truth? All her mutterings not madness, but an overheard conversation with the dead?

  She turned away, her gown staying put in his hand, sliding away from her skin, baring shoulders gone black.

  They were the marks of heavy hands, but no human left marks that grew black, then turned to something other. He touched her left shoulder, traced the long shadow, ridged beneath his fingers, the rasp of scales. In the tracts Janus had read, a god's touch might manifest so, altering the body of their worshipper. Hadn't Maledicte, at the very end, sprouted feathers, black against his white skin? This looked like more of the same and if so, allowing Psyke to remain his enemy was no longer an option; he needed to win her away from the duchess.

  “Why do you praise Aris so?” Janus said, voice rough. An awkward question, but not incendiary, and something he dearly wanted an answer to. “He was a deadly king for this country. Nothing but a fool.”

  “As much a fool as you must think me. You will not cozen me,” she said, and he slid his palm over the petals of her lips. Edged pearl flashed, set his fingers dancing away, nursing the tiny hurt where she had bitten. A bead of blood rolled up to the surface of his skin, etched two fingerprints with crimson.

  She slowly slipped free from his grasp, scale giving way to sleek skin beneath his fingers. Psyke left the nightgown in his possession, walked away from him, leaving only the warmth of the silk falling through his hands. He cast it aside, and followed her. “You listen to the dead but can't be bothered to listen to me?”

  “The dead, at least, are honest,” she said, and while the easy acceptance of his accusation made his stomach clench, he still found a rebuttal for her.

  “They can afford it; they are long past the point their enemies can damage them.”

  Psyke stepped into a black gown, drew it against her bare skin like any harlot, in that much of a hurry to escape his company. Janus caught the loose tapes at the back, and when she twisted to look at him, merely said, “Dahlia's ill. Again. You might cede to the inevitable. My hands, or wait even longer in my company.”

  Janus brought the gown up, covered those hard, rough spots on her shoulders, using the edges of his hand to test the width of the taint.

  She sighed, and Janus busied himself with rows of tiny jet buttons, his bitten fingers leaving a few smears of blood on her white back.

  “Your beloved Aris,” he said, “allowed the Relicts to molder for generations. What king permits a section of his city to rot, breeding villains, poverty, and plague, and makes no attempt to repair it?”

  The tassel of her braided hair, a welter of snarls, scented faintly of blood and powder, brushed the backs of his hands as he worked, stung his face as she swung round to protest his blackening of Aris's character. He pressed a kiss to her mouth, a more civilized way to silence her than a hard hand clamped tight, and turned her back around.

  “Aris was a good man,” she said.

  “Good enough to watch his brother throw his pregnant and noble-blooded paramour into the streets and make no objection,” Janus said. “A good man overall though, given his rank, his expectations. But as a king? What will history praise him for? For surrendering to Itarus when the cost of lives grew high?

  “More people suffer now—hunger, fear, uncertainty—under the Itarusine treaty rules than died. War kills soldiers. The treaty starves infants and women, turns soldiers to forgotten toys and our future to ashes. Aris was a scholar, well versed in history; he knew the cost, but his tender heart couldn't allow the war to continue.”

  “People were dying,” Psyke said.

  Janus turned her to face him, and whispered close, hot in her ear. “We would have won, Psyke.” She pulled back to look at him, blue eyes sober and calm. Listening, he dared hope that her reasonable mind could sort truth even from a distrusted speaker. “Each winter that the battle dragged out brought us closer to a victory. It was a seaman's war: our ships were superior, quicker to be replaced, and Itarus froze each winter, locking them in, leaving them with supply—”

  “I know the history; I lived it,” Psyke said. “I watched my father leave and never return, watched as the royal house
diminished from six to two. War is about more than strength and logic, Janus. The country couldn't stomach the grief.”

  “Couldn't stomach the change,” Janus countered. “Aris gathered his apathy from Antyre itself. Its own worst enemy. The war bit into the nobles' lives and so had to stop before the season could be disrupted again.”

  “Will you bring war back on us?” Psyke said. “Is that your idea of the future, why you treated us to the spectacle at the docks?”

  “I don't want war. But neither do I think Antyre should cower, afraid to grow, afraid to breathe, for fear of Itarus's displeasure.”

  “A schoolboy's idealism,” Psyke said.

  Janus laughed. “I was born in the Relicts, trained in politics by the most ruthless Itarusine prince ascendant—do you believe idealism is a fault of mine? Antyre must change or die. Aris was content to let us fade.”

  Psyke shook her head, but it was a quick, aborted gesture; her eyes were sad, as if she would like to debate the point but couldn't, trapped in her own memories of the king.

  “Adiran is a sweet child, but he cannot claim the throne. To rule by committee is a fool's game. Help Antyre, Psyke. Help me. Cast your support with me. The past is only peopled by death and despair. Aid me, any way you can,” he said. He stroked his fingers over the marks on her shoulders; she arched into him, lips parting on a silent moan.

  “At the very least, don't hinder me,” he continued, pitching his voice to show nothing but earnestness and entreaty. “Allow me to bring Antyre into the future, help her prosper and grow. After that, if you still wish me gone, you're welcome to try.”

  She shivered against him, close enough that his breath ruffled back to him when he sighed. She turned, mutely presenting the last space of bare skin to be buttoned away.

  He stroked his hand up the delicate knobs of her spine, let his hands sink into the warmth beneath the tangle of her hair, before pressing the last tiny buttons into their matching loops. “Your plans for the day?”

  She smiled at him, slow, sweet, uncomplicated, the very picture of demure trust. “I thought to see to Adiran's needs, and then Celeste is sending her carriage for me.”

  Hot fury spiked in him; he swallowed it, though it burned his throat and belly; and her face paled, arguing against his complete success. But he refused to revisit last night's confrontation. Psyke was dangerous enough as a noblewoman and wife; last night she had been something far more deadly. If it slumbered now, coiled within her skin, he chose not to wake it.

  “Take a guard,” Janus said. “If things are so unsettled that Harm will strike within the palace—”

  “Will you suggest a guard I can trust?” Psyke said. “Or should I take your boy Tarrant and save you the trouble of spying on me?”

  “Do as you will,” he said, pulling away. “Give Celeste my warmest regards and tell her I remember her.”

  “I'm sure she'll find that… comforting,” she said, wrapped in an armor he couldn't penetrate with words.

  He let her go, sick with frustration and for the first time contemplating that as bad as his position was, it could be worsened. The gods seemed minded to play with Antyrrian souls of late; Janus meant to see they caused little harm. As much as Ani had been a boon, granting Maledicte immunity to hurt, She had also been a curse. The gods, Janus thought, should have no place in mortal deeds.

  Janus returned to his own rooms, grimly pleased at the bloodstain beside the bed and hearth, signs that he had had his moment of triumph amid adversity, and rang for his valet.

  Padget sighed when Janus ruined the line of his best coat by strapping his blade to his hip, but made no comment. The man learned. So did Janus. His blade would be at his side from now on, no matter the comments it occasioned.

  He sent a page with a message to Ivor, requesting a moment of the man's time. A letter awaited him spattered with transparent grease marks around the seal. Chryses or Delight undoubtedly, and when Janus broke the seal, he found a tight smile on his face. Chryses, in the aftermath of his disobedience, was not so sanguine as to his continued employment with Janus, though he cloaked it in a too-careless demand about Janus's next wishes. Janus could almost hear Delight's exasperation with his brother, the idiot.

  Janus bent to the letter, crossed the sepia pen strokes with blue ink and sent Chryses back to spy on Harm. Dangerous, yes, but Chryses had seemed certain he could gull Harm. If the antimachinist was, as Psyke seemed to imply an Itarusine agitator, Janus needed the information. He folded the paper over, melted the old wax, and dribbled it over the edge.

  Another page, unluckier than most, and well aware of it from the huffy sigh barely suppressed, was dispatched to the streets outside the palace and to Seahook. Without waiting longer for a response from Ivor, Janus headed toward the prince's suite. Visiting Ivor would fuel gossip; best it be done before the rest of the palace awoke, and Janus knew Ivor well enough to know the man was awake with the dawn. The prince had a ferret's obsessive interest in everything to do with power; if anyone could guide him to what… possessed… Psyke, Ivor could. The difficulty came in getting an answer without betraying how much Janus needed one.

  ♦ 17 ♦

  SMALL PARADE TRAILED JANUS down the stairs and halls of the palace. Six guards traveled in Janus's wake, studying one another as warily as they studied him.

  Assassination attempts always complicated matters. The guards' uniforms, overnight, seemed to have sprouted minute but meaningful differences; three of the guards sported a black-edged ribbon twined about their sword hilts.

  Janus hoped the ribbons weren't the marks of those loyal to him: How infuriating to have defenders unable to free their blades from the tangle of ribbon and sheath. On the other hand, if they were his enemies' marks, well, how kind of them to tag themselves so visibly for him. He would have to see whether Evan Tarrant appeared beribboned or not. In the interim, he thought of them all equally as unreliable allies, much like the gang of children he and Miranda had led in the Relicts.

  As they clattered down the last flight of stairs, the guards' boot heels noisy on the stone, they were met by a squad of the palace soldiers, set to watch Ivor Grigorian, and Janus stifled a sigh. He had known his visit to Ivor would be a matter for gossip, but with as many witnesses as he had gathered, and with the ribbons' rapid appearance a clear sign of exactly how quickly word could spread within the palace walls … well, he had hoped for more time.

  He thought briefly about turning around, but caution and cowardice were two separate traits; caution was acceptable, cowardice was not. Janus tapped on Ivor's door. Dmitry opened it to him with a bow, a smile, and a murmured, “My lord, good to see you again,” before ushering him into Ivor's private dining room.

  Ivor, seated at one end of the long table, let his pen fall, and raised a smile with an ease that Janus could only attempt to imitate. “My pet, how considerate of you to save me the time otherwise spent assuring you of your welcome.” He folded the note, added a careless splash of wax that nonetheless sealed the note with exactitude, and stamped it.

  He tapped the edge on the desk, testing that the wax had firmed, and passed it, plus a sheaf of others, to the manservant.

  Janus couldn't help but eye the correspondence with suspicion, thinking of Itarusine agitators beneath his very nose, of assassins paid in foreign coin. The expression on Ivor's face—calculation and amusement—stifled Janus's desire to confront the prince ascendant regarding Harm. Ivor expected him to do so, and Janus had had enough of performing as the man wished.

  “You're turning into your father,” Ivor commented. “All pinched-face disapproval and suspicion. It doesn't suit you, pet. It augurs anxiety and self-doubt.”

  “For you to correspond so much argues your unhappiness here. Perhaps you should ask Grigor to recall you.”

  “Come now, you know better. Vying for a throne requires constant vigilance and effort.” Ivor stretched, long and lean, as smugly content as a cat, the type of self-aware pleasure that sent debutantes into
ecstasies of speculation over what secrets such a smile held.

  Janus could think of one reason for Ivor to be so satisfied: if he had made progress in his plans.

  And what was he to take from that assumption? That Ivor had nothing to do with Harm's attempt on Janus's life? If Psyke's words could be trusted, and Harm was indeed the instigator … then perhaps Ivor and Harm were two separate agents of the Itarusine court, and Antyre was in more difficulties than Janus had dreamed.

  “I begin to wonder why you came at all if you have nothing to say,” Ivor said, still draped across his chair, as confident as if it were a throne and Janus his supplicant.

  Coming here had been a mistake, Janus thought, but there was no retreat. He squared his shoulders and said, “You once told me there comes a time when respect demands honesty instead of fencing with words.”

  “Between equals,” Ivor said. “And friends. Are we either of those?”

  Janus dropped onto the chaise beside the breakfast table, looked at the remains of Ivor's meal, chose a pastry from a plate, and picked at it, sorting shreds of spiced game from the crust. His stomach growled and he ate, irritated at the waste of food.

  A rough hand stroked his hair, crown to nape, and he jerked. Ivor sat beside him, and sighed. “Such a difficult pet, always reverting to the wild just when you believe him tamed.”

  Janus chose not to reply; sometimes silence was the safest retort.

  “Surely you didn't come here to cadge scraps from my plate? Tell me, what can I do for you?”

  Janus said, “No barter, no consideration? You simply want to know? You've gone native, Ivor.” He found a ginger amusement in the slight stiffening of Ivor's posture. Something had struck more closely than Ivor would care to admit. Something like his desire for the Antyrrian throne. Janus's amusement faded.

  Ivor saw a chance for a throne with only a few men standing between him and it. Janus, a handful of Antyrrian lords, and an idiot child—far better odds than Ivor faced in Itarus.

  “So tell me, pet, how I can aid a man who once controlled a god, even secondhand?” Ivor took a sip of cooling coffee, grimaced, then pushed the cup away. “I wonder what it is about Antyre that directs women to pacts with the dead gods.”