Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  The outcry in the street took on a feverish pitch. Janus pressed Psyke back to the seat.

  Walker dropped off the foot rail, disappeared from sight with a grunt. Janus hissed, bent, pulled the knife from his boot, and put it into Psyke's hands. “Guard yourself.”

  “I have better weapons than steel at my disposal, though I thank you for your concern,” she said. And it wasn't Psyke in her eyes, but the cold superiority of Mirabile. Challacombe would know better than to spurn a weapon of any kind. And Aris? Would he still be turning the blade in his hands, reluctant to admit the need for it?

  Janus hastened out of the carriage at another shout and the splintering of wood, the screaming of horses. Not their carriage, thankfully, but close.

  The street was a seething mass of packed carriages—horses breaking free and shouldering through, heads raised, eyes white and wild—and in the midst of it all, the antimachinists, hands full of rocks, were laying concerted efforts into destroying everything they could. The chant demanding Poole's release had grown ragged, gone incomprehensible as all unison was lost.

  A pistol shot cracked the air, and Janus crouched, hand going to his saber. A guard? Or did the rioters have more dangerous weapons?

  A single antimachinist saw Janus, and his eyes widened in fierce exultation. “Ixion!” He plunged toward him, raising a stick studded with broken glass.

  Janus fell back. He knew that sticks were far more dangerous than the nobles acknowledged; he had used them to considerable effect himself as a youth. He wasn't hampered by ignorance or surprise, and when the man moved into range, Janus unsheathed his saber into the man's heart. Clean and quick, the best way to deal with enemies in a shifting crowd of this size.

  Simpson burst through a small knot of struggling men; common people going about their business who found their morning violently interrupted and were trying to get out of the way.

  “My lord!”

  Janus didn't have a response for him. His attention had been drawn across the square where Gost's carriage, distinctive with its heavy sun-shading draperies across the doors, was listing, nearly tilted over.

  The epiphany burst over him. This was Ivor's plan. This was the manner in which he chose to remove Gost. A riot, where any death could be deemed accidental, but the damage done…. Janus gritted his teeth, regretting the bargain more than ever.

  Gost's carriage swayed; the dark curtain billowed into the shape of two men, struggling. Janus kicked a man in the knee; the man—antimachinist or frightened citizen, it didn't matter—collapsed and cleared a path for Janus's next few steps. Simpson called after him, doggedly pursuing.

  The carriage door burst open, revealing a heavyset, hawk-face blond wielding a bloody sword, as overtly a murderer as any stage villain. Gost's body tumbled out after him, rolling into the dirt.

  The man dropped from the step, landed with an awkward lurch; and Janus found himself suddenly too close to him, in a clearing that hadn't existed a heartbeat ago.

  The assassin's face was shadowed by a low-brimmed hat, but his eyes flicked once at Janus, letting the bloody sword shift to preparedness again. Janus frowned but echoed it. Not a rapier, but a saber. An Itarusine to be sure, no matter the Antyrrian laborer's clothes.

  The man's gaze shifted abruptly to someone in back of Janus; Janus half turned, unwilling to be caught from behind, equally aware that it might be nothing more than a feint. The man hurled himself into the crowd and did his best to disappear.

  Simpson drew up beside Janus, pistol still held ready. “Who was that?”

  “Harm, I believe,” Janus said. He stared at the crowd a moment longer, reliving the moment when Harm landed, that awkward lurch; Chryses had said the man was scarred heavily, but that argued scars that reached into muscle. It stirred small chords of memory, but came to nothing.

  “Harm his avocation, also. Gost is dead.”

  Most decidedly so. Closer inspection revealed the wounds to be ugly, sloppy, and indecisive, as if Harm had dithered between the heart, the liver, the stomach, and finally selected them all.

  Make it hurt, Janus had said. Ivor had apparently passed along those instructions, or Harm was just the sort to enjoy it. Gost's face was white and contorted, his eyes bulging, his mouth obscured by a froth of blood.

  Hoofbeats and ringing handbells penetrated the shouts and screams, and Janus allowed Simpson to keep him sheltered against Gost's coach while the Particulars cleared the streets of rioters with shot, sword, and spear.

  When he returned to his coach, Simpson in tow, he found Psyke sitting on the coachman's bench, face tilted back as if she were enjoying the quiet and the sunshine, her bare feet dangling, while all about her, men lay dead, including Walker. Janus bent, turned him over, but found no wound. Simpson, kneeling over first one corpse, then another, cast a burdened glance at Psyke and made the tiny avert against evil.

  ♦ 23 ♦

  HE PALACE WAS SILENT THAT night, dinner around the great table, subdued. Servants ghosted about with reddened eyes and unhappy faces: The Particulars' solution to the rioting had been to kill or arrest the commoners in the square whether they declared they were simple merchants or boasted of being antimachinists. Husbands and brothers had been taken to Stones, fathers and uncles had been killed, and still, the servers bent their heads.

  Janus watched them and kept a careful rein on his appetite. Poison was too easy to come by, and there was a store of ill will focused on the nobility at the moment.

  Harm, of course, had managed to elude the soldiers. Rue swore it wouldn't be for long, and had set the Particulars back to their hunt. Even now, they fanned the embers of the riot anew in their search of houses, shops, inns, and ships. Perhaps they had even braved the Relicts.

  Janus turned his gaze from Gost's empty seat, found Ivor watching him. The prince tilted his goblet just slightly, enough so that Janus knew it for the toast it was, but others might see only a temporarily unsteady hand.

  Psyke, seated at the head of the table, sat between two empty chairs—Aris's and Gost's. Her eyes were unfocused; her lips moved in constant whispers, and Janus doubted she felt alone at all. The rest of the table was studded with other absences. Adiran—confined to his nursery under doubled guard. The duchess—sealed into her Garden Square residence, behind shuttered windows and locked doors, out of rage at Gost's death, or fear.

  Janus sent back his plate, the meal untouched, and excused himself. Bull hastily took a last forkful and stood. DeGuerre grumbled but threw down his napkin and rose also. Ivor grinned, lounged back in his seat, and said, “Time for after dinner drinks already? I knew I was going to like you as regent, my pet.”

  Janus froze, caught on the points of several different realizations, some of them pleasant, some of them … not. With Gost's death, with Blythe's odd absence, with Bull's apparent support, the regency was nearly his; Admiral DeGuerre might grumble, but he knew it. With Gost gone, Janus was the ranking man at the table. When he rose, the meal ended, as did his hopes for a quiet escape. Ivor, damn him, read the surprise on his face all too easily.

  Janus refused to sit back down, refused to show he had forgotten such basic etiquette, and so merely nodded before retiring to the parlor. Psyke looked up, her eyes drowning blue, alone at the table with her ghosts.

  Ivor followed them into the king's study, settled himself with all the smugness of a cat having gained access to a place it was forbidden to be.

  Janus ignored him for the moment, but Ivor's presence cast a heavy pall over the room. Bull looked near to bursting; DeGuerre grew more dyspeptic by the second. The only thing lacking was Blythe sulking like a spoiled child or itching to duel.

  “Where is Blythe?” Janus asked. It was the only question suited to the audience at hand. Any talk of the riot, Gost's death, or politics would have to wait.

  Admiral DeGuerre was the one to break silence and answer, contempt for Blythe momentarily overriding his dislike of Janus. “Fled to the countryside,” he said. “Rethought his cha
llenge to you.”

  “Apparently,” Bull said, “he was much struck with your guard's account of how you held your own in the rioting. Simpson tells me you defeated several armed rioters on your own?”

  “They had sticks,” Janus said. “I had a sword.”

  “I understand your wife accounted for six men, including her guard, and with no mark upon them,” Ivor said. “How does she explain it? Or is it something you'd rather keep secret?”

  Janus's neck tightened. Ivor's tone was amused, light, but Janus could read the demand in it clearly enough. Ivor had upheld his end by killing Gost; now it was Janus who had to do the same.

  “Bull, DeGuerre, if you'll excuse me. Again. It's been a difficult day, likely to be as difficult tomorrow—”

  “Don't worry so, pet,” Ivor said. “When the Itarusine fleet arrives, we'll calm any remaining pockets of unrest.”

  Janus seized Ivor's arm, pulled him from his chair, aware as always of the solidity of muscle and sinew over bone. Ivor was a bruiser for all his cat lounging and graceful mannerism; he rose because he wanted to go where Janus led. Adiran's nursery.

  JANUS WAITED UNTIL THEY WERE a safe distance from the study, from Bull or DeGuerre deciding to join them or object, belatedly, to Ivor's tone. Waited until they were in the quiet corridors leading to the main stairwell.

  “I asked you to kill one man,” Janus said, “not turn my city into a battlefield.”

  “Some tasks are easier to begin than end,” Ivor said. “And it was your error, not mine. You were unclear in your boundaries.”

  Janus hissed out a breath, but it was true, and he should have known better. Asking Ivor for a favor was more akin to dealing with a wish granter than a man. If the deed could be twisted, Ivor would be quick to see the path best suited to his own needs.

  Ivor smiled. “Come now, admit your true irritation. It's not the uprising; you should be thanking me for that. I gave you a clear reason to be rid of the antimachinists. And some of them, permanently, I understand.”

  “Not Harm,” Janus said.

  “No,” Ivor said, “though you could have seized him, were you not slowed by expecting another assassin in his place.”

  Ivor moved ahead of him, making Janus take quick steps to catch him up, and each one of them an echo of his inner frustration. They rounded the corner, found the guards lurching to attention, their faces writ with dismay. Janus alone would have perturbed them; Ivor's presence was another level of discomfort.

  “My lord,” the guard said.

  “We've come to see Adiran,” Janus said. “We won't be long.” That with a meaningful glance at Ivor. Janus waved the guards in alongside them as their unhappy escort.

  Adiran sat up as they entered, coming awake all at once. Beside his narrow bed, another slim body rested. Evan, Janus identified, asleep not in the penitential servant's quarters allotted him, but wrapped in furs and velvet as if he were a replacement for the banished hounds.

  The boy prince crawled out of his bed, carefully stepping over Evan, and came toward them. Once in the low, yellow lamplight, ever burning, near the door, he raised his face and Ivor shifted behind Janus when he glimpsed the piebald eyes, one gone yellow-black, one blue.

  “Janus,” Adiran said. In his childish voice lingered earlier reminders of Ani's displeasure with him. It made Janus cautious, made him wish he knew what Ivor wanted of the boy.

  Adiran was on that fragile cusp; Black-Winged Ani had improved the prince's mind, no doubt preparatory to striking a compact with him. If Adiran fell—then Antyre fell also, no matter Janus's attempts to hold it. Regent was one thing, a polite lie that the nobles would allow.

  A usurping bastard king? Unthinkable.

  Adiran tugged at Janus's sleeve, all boy, just a boy, the hope for the kingdom. Janus knelt beside him, ruffled his hair, trying to ignore the tiny stiff prickles against his palm that might be pinfeathers mixed into the blond tufts. “Brought Prince Ivor to see you,” he said. “Be polite.”

  Adiran slid out of Janus's loose hold, walked fearlessly up to Ivor though the guards' hands tensed so tightly on their swords the hilts creaked.

  “Prince,” Adiran said, a question in his tone. Janus wondered how much lessoning the boy was getting. It was one thing to lock him away, to teach him only how to play when he was mindless. Now, though, perhaps there should be tutors. If Janus could find any he trusted. Adiran could be too easily shaped by information.

  As if such thoughts passed to him, Ivor said, “I meant to visit you sooner, your highness. After the death of your father.”

  Adiran stiffened, tilted his head for a better angle, shifting the crow's eye upward to study Ivor, but he said nothing.

  Ivor reached out slowly, allowing the guards time to see his hands were empty, allowing Adiran the chance to step back. But the boy held his position even when Ivor's fingers tucked themselves beneath Adiran's chin.

  “Ani's child,” he said. “A seed sown by Maledicte.”

  Rue spoke up from the hall, his voice harsh, his breath coming quick, as if he had run to the nursery on hearing of Adiran's unexpected visitors. He waved the other guards out and they looked grateful. “Prince Ivor, the child can be of no interest to you.”

  Ivor ignored Rue entirely, and asked, “Do you know who killed your father, boy?”

  The question dropped like a stone into water, setting ripples of tension through the room. A rustle and a sigh heralded Evan waking; his sudden, whistled breath heralded his recognizing Ivor.

  Ivor's face blanched as Adiran turned to study him more intently. Ivor withdrew his hand, shaking it as if lightning had coursed from Adiran's flesh to his.

  Janus, regrettably close, thought something like that might have happened. The boy's human eye began to splotch, dark shapes bleeding through the blue.

  “Do you know?” the boy echoed. “No one will tell me.”

  As if to prove the boy's assertion, the silence stretched. Ivor caught Janus's gaze in his own, the battlefield clear between them. Ivor could blame Janus; Janus could lay the blame at Ivor's feet, but the death of Itarus's favored prince ascendant would only bring war faster.

  Adiran stamped his foot; the ripple ran across the room, and the toys on his shelves began to dance and stutter. Evan closed the distance between them and said, “They don't know either, Adi. I told you. Now come lie down.”

  The wildness in the room, a feathery musk that Janus had last smelled when fighting Mal, faded under Evan's small dictatorship. Rue smiled briefly at Janus. “I'm afraid I've commandeered your page.”

  “Welcome to him,” Janus said.

  Ivor turned, blindly left the room, hand seeking the wall for support. Janus followed him. Ivor turned, expression savage. “You intend to let him live?”

  “He's a boy,” Janus said. “The Antyrrian prince, and your words are perilously close to treason.”

  “He's tainted,” Ivor said, but the usual banter was gone from his voice. “He's dangerous. There'll be no kingdom for either of us while he lives.”

  “Less for you,” Janus said. “After all, you killed—”

  Ivor hit him, tried to, but Janus had been expecting it and avoided the blow. Ivor wouldn't want him to finish that sentence, not anywhere near where Adiran could hear him. Janus hadn't intended to, but enjoyed that brief show of panic on Ivor's face nonetheless.

  The guards rushed forward and Ivor took a few steps back, hands raised. “A misunderstanding,” he said. “But if you gentlemen would care to escort me to my wing, I'd be appreciative.”

  Janus admired it. Even shaken, Ivor remained poised. Far more so than Janus, who felt trapped between the problems Adiran posed and the pressing approach of the Itarusine fleet, bringing Grigor's letter of censure for breaking the treaty.

  “Trust me,” Rue said abruptly. Janus jerked. “I've done my scholarly studies. If Adiran can be kept from killing anyone, he should stay as he is. Safe.”

  “For how long?” Janus said. “Until he's grown
? Until he learns what anger is? Until we have a mad king with feathers in his skin and death in his eyes?”

  Rue's jaw firmed, expressing displeasure or determination. “That's up to you, my lord. You have the plans for the future. You used the god once before to suit your needs. Surely you have a similar plan now.”

  Sudden bitter amusement swelled in Janus's breast, bubbling up into mad laughter. “But, Rue,” he said, “I didn't believe in the gods then.”

  He left Rue gaping after him, took to the corridors with exhaustion and a mind too numbed to do anything but turn facts this way and that, like a blind jeweler going through the motions when the talent has been lost.

  It was only the scent that saved him: a curl of sweet lilac in a dark hall preceding the bitter tang of oiled steel. Janus reared back and took the dagger across the side of his left forearm instead of through his throat.

  Over the blade, Savne panted, face going witless in panic, the face of a man who had been relying on a single thrust and the element of surprise.

  Janus pushed back hard, giving himself a much-needed space between them. If it were at the cost of the blade slicing deeper into his arm, it didn't matter. The brocade of his sleeve had been pushed in at the same moment as the blade, clinging to the open lips of the wound, staunching the blood flow. Janus punched Savne beneath the join of his rib cage. It was the first blow he'd ever learned, though when he was a child, it involved a stick or stone to add force he lacked. Those days were past and Savne's breastbone cracked, a wet pop; the man folded inward, breath gone, the knife dropping from a hand gone lax.

  Janus let him fall, kneed him in the same spot as Savne folded forward. The man wheezed pain, the sound going liquid as ribs gave under the second blow. Janus caught the knife and bent over Savne's huddled form.

  Savne rolled to his back, raising his hands to shield his face, but the movement was a mistake. The man's eyes rolled in his head as the shifting bones in his chest caused him to pass out.