Kings and Assassins

by Lane Robins

  He wondered if Psyke would say the same. Haith had gifted her with immortality of a type, the ability to die and rise again. But He had also left her head mazed with ghosts, left her body altered by His touch.

  No, on the subject of gods, Psyke and he were likely in rare accord.

  Evan thrust the note at him, still at arm's length, and Janus reached past it, seized the boy's wrist, and drew him closer. “Hold still,” he said. “You're always darting off before I can respond to messages these days.”

  Evan stopped working his wrist in Janus's grip. Janus plucked the note from the boy's grip with his bad hand, flipped it open. Unsealed. Rue was either in a hurry, or nothing much of importance was contained within.

  It proved to be the latter: The note was a simple message that could have been delivered verbally, were it not that Janus would distrust any such message.

  Last, meet me at the dowager's tower at your convenience. Callan Rue

  Perhaps Rue had finally gotten answers from the assassin.

  “There'll be no need for a return message,” Janus said.

  Evan tugged, trying to free his wrist. Janus said, “Don't you want a reward? You used to ask me for candy.” He passed Evan a handful of hard candies stored in his pocket—much to Padget's frustration—for this occasion. Janus wasn't fool enough to think Evan's affections could be recovered so easily, but he was one of the few pages who could be relied upon to send Janus's messages to the ones he meant to receive them. “Share them with Adiran if you want.”

  The boy looked at the candy, translucent green with syrupy pink and gold liquid centers gleaming through and said, “They have Laudable in them.”

  “Only the gold ones,” Janus said. “And it's a child's dose. To soothe away nightmares. You might have need of them if you continue to sleep in Adiran's rooms. I often had nightmares near Maledicte. I have them near Psyke.”

  “Lady Psyke?” Evan asked, as if he couldn't credit it.

  “The god touched make difficult friends,” Janus said. “Still, if your dreams are pleasant, perhaps Adiran's are not.”

  He finally released the boy, felt cheered when Evan didn't back away immediately but studied Janus's face as if his childish experience could explain adult motives.

  “Thank you,” Evan said. A bit curt, and his leave-taking abrupt after that, but Janus was pleased. He'd win the boy back yet.

  He took a last look through the spyglass; there had been no miracle, the Icebear bulled onward. Janus went inside, the quiet halls dim and silent after the whip of the wind at tower height, the mutters of the rooks, and the brightness of the sun on the sea.

  He gestured one of the guards back outside to keep watch on the Icebear, waved off the ones who attempted to fall into step with him. Ever since he was shot at in the throne room, Janus had eschewed private guards, preferring not to have his wariness dulled by the presence of men who might not aid him should he need it. He carried his blade openly, loosely sheathed, and had foregone the tight coats currently in fashion for a looser style that allowed greater ranges of motion.

  Rue leaned against the door to the dowager's tower, in conference with a mixed group of Particulars and kingsguards, reporting from the docks.

  Delight had decided that the docks could be made more secure if they ran brass gates between the quays in the shallower waters. Admiral DeGuerre had opposed the idea even as Delight had finished explaining it, objecting that it wouldn't stop the icebreaker, and arguing that it would be tantamount to declaring that Antyre had no intention of honoring the treaty with Itarus.

  Janus had been set to interrupt the battle between father and son, but Delight, resolve firmed, had simply shaken his head. “The waters are too shallow for the icebreaker; we'll slow the smaller boats, making them vulnerable to our cannons should it come to that; and as for not honoring the treaty—well, if the city is beset by plague, is it so improbable that we would seal our harbor?”

  From what Janus overheard now, the gates had been fed into the waters on long brass wires, entangling one or two of the boats that were installing them.

  Rue waved everyone off at Janus's approach, reminding them to keep Delight under careful escort.

  “Last,” Rue said.

  “Anything from her?” Janus asked.

  Rue shook his head.

  “She won't talk?”

  “Oh, she talks,” Rue said, “but nothing useful. Not even her name. She seems more afraid of giving us that than she fears the whip. As for Ivor's complicity in Aris's death—she won't even admit she knows him, all evidence to the contrary.”

  “How can one woman cause us so much grief?” he said. “A single confession from her, and Itarus would have to withdraw its strongest charges. We'd be back to our careful stalemate.”

  “I don't think we can count on her confession,” Rue said. “She doesn't fear physical violence. And she's clever. She's convinced half my men that if they mistreat her she'll call Ani down upon them, swearing bloody vengeance.”

  “The gods again,” Janus said. “I wish they'd never returned. Speaking of which … Adiran is being watched?”

  “A series of guards changing on the hour—if he sneaks out, he'll be missed quickly—and the back passageways watched also. Your page Evan's the only one who's allowed in, takes him his meals, reads to him, though sometimes Adiran tells him stories instead. And it's enough to freeze your blood, the words that come out of our prince's mouth.”

  “They can be no more disturbing than what Psyke mutters in her sleep,” Janus countered.

  Rue shook his head. “Last, I don't like this. Black-Winged Ani is threat enough, even muted as She is. To add the Countess of Last's troubles to the mix—”

  “Psyke seems to have gained confidence and control,” Janus said. “Adiran is supervised. My concerns currently are all for Ivor.”

  “Yes,” Rue said. “He's been—”

  “Entirely too amiable at being relegated to prisoner. His people have been contained also?”

  “The servants and guards he brought with him, yes. Any others he may have suborned within the palace are still free.”

  Janus slumped, feeling as if he were shouldering a stone. Even knowing it would be heavy, the weight was still surprising and unpleasant.

  “He won't bide much longer,” Janus said. “Make her talk. If she intimidates the guards with her blather about Ani—if she could summon Her, Ivor would have had her do so at once, always greedy for power—we'll send her someone unlikely to know fear.”

  “You have someone in mind?”

  “Psyke,” Janus said. “She claims to speak to ghosts. If the assassin will not talk, perhaps her ghosts will.”

  ♦ 27 ♦

  TONE WALLS, IVOR SOFIA GRIGORIAN mused, looked impregnable, soothed nervous hearts, and generally made effective prisons. Generally. It all depended on who was trapped inside, and what they were willing to do in the name of freedom. Ivor studied the piles before him with wary satisfaction.

  Dmitry tapped on the door to Ivor's dining room-turned practice salle, and came in. “The palace delivered foodstuffs to our cook, unprepared, as you asked, and fresh as the city could provide.”

  “How accommodating,” Ivor said. “Janus's need to be civil will be the death of him. The news?”

  Dmitry held out a long curl of waxed paper, still spattered here and there with blood from the cuts of beef that had concealed it. Ivor set it on a chair, wiped it once more, the better to read the notes his agents had sent him.

  It was plague in the streets, or something much like it; Ivor supposed the answer would lie in how many people died instead of recovered. His lips thinned. Janus had surprised him there, shown a broader focus and more decisive hand than Ivor had expected.

  Gates were being strung between the harbor docks, spikes just below the surface, traps for any small vessel trying to make its way ashore. “Now that,” Ivor said, “is shortsighted. Once the Kyrdics hear Antyre has taken to laying snares in the waters, they
won't want to trade. It's dishonorable. Ixion listened to the wrong advice there.”

  “In the interim, sir, it leaves you without escape,” Dmitry said. “And the city is too insalubrious for me to recommend hiding in plain sight—”

  “Ah, but this is Antyre,” Ivor said. “And the waters are warm. A fence meant to snare inbound boats is not much of an obstacle to an outbound swimmer. Still, my little assassin's lazy and hates expending effort. She'll complain for days about having to swim.”

  Dmitry stiffened, his square-set shoulders going fractionally more so. His eyes flicked to the note and back again.

  Ivor let out a breath, interpreting Dmitry's expression as bad news and related to her. He skimmed to the bottom of the note, where the news was added by his palace informants. “They've captured her.”

  “She might speak—”

  “She won't—” Ivor murmured more to himself than Dmitry. “The dowager's tower is on the central wing, is it not?”

  “You're not considering rescuing her—”

  “I was planning on visiting Adiran on my way out. What's another few flights of stairs?” Ivor tapped the note thoughtfully.

  “With respect, sir, you should have killed her once she had accomplished the task you purchased her for.”

  Ivor said, “What man discards a tool when it's still of use?”

  “She will speak, sooner or later.”

  “No,” Ivor said. “She can't. I hold her name. Should I speak it, well, it would garner her the attention she least desires. She'll hold her tongue to the death.”

  “Still, our father will be displeased that you let so distinctive a tool fall into enemy hands. Your secrets may be sacrosanct; she may not care about revealing others.”

  “Grigor won't know. Unless you intend to tell him?” There were benefits, he thought, watching the man shake his head, to having new tools. Old ones often had old agendas. Dmitry, with a single damning phrase—“our father”—slipped and revealed more than he had intended. Grigor hadn't sent Ivor to Antyre on his own after all.

  Ivor bent his attention back to the note, skimming the intervening messages his agents had thought pertinent. The antimachinists, it seemed, had drawn back in disarray, confused by their leader's unmasking and drowning in the influx of released prisoners. It was only to be expected; Ivor hadn't anticipated any further use for them. The antimachinists were unable to burn a single house without outside encouragement.

  Ivor lit a match, let it fall to the stone beneath his feet, and while it sputtered and flickered, he fed the note into it until it was greasy ash on his fingers.

  He smudged the stone with a booted foot, watching the ash turn to a darker streak on a polished floor. Stone was challenging. One not raised in Grigor's Winter Court might not think it possible to defeat. But Ivor had vivid experience reminding him otherwise.

  He'd been a boy still, just given his first real blade as a prize for recovering from the plague when so many of his brothers had sickened and died.

  Grigor feared lingering miasma and ordered his mistresses to burn out the rest of it, claiming the palace was their domain.

  Ivor had followed as his mother, Sofia, painted the stone walls with an oily paste, smeared it thickly into chinks in mortar, directing a small army of servitors to do the same. Anya, his aunt, had found fuel by the simple expedient of tearing down all the portraits of courtiers she disliked or despised. Ivor helped roll tapestries, and pile them like logs in doorways and near heavily draped windows. Then they lit fires, careful of their long skirts, heedless of those who were still too weak or too ill to leave.

  The fires had raged until the stones glowed nearly black with heat and the ice fields on the mountainside ran thick with melting ash and soot.

  Rather than wait for the plague to take its toll, Grigor had claimed a victory over it by defining the extent of its spread, by saying here and no farther.

  Perhaps, Ivor thought drily, he should have been more cautious when urging Janus to read the Itarusine histories and learn from them. Janus was nothing if not retentive. Murne, unlike the winter palace, could not be scoured from within. Too open, too many wooden structures, too much soft-baked brick, and the water so near.

  Still, Ivor intended to try. Grigor wanted Antyre for its ice-free waters, for its rich soil—the cities were of lesser interest to him.

  Twilight was settling in; a slow weight in the stones, a drift of shadow through arrow slits, and Ivor rose to begin his work. His mother would have been scornful of the tools he had to hand, an assortment of discarded lamps he had drained for their oil, the fat from the kitchen, coals.

  Stone didn't burn, this was true. But the furnishings would, and nicely.

  “The servants?” Dmitry asked once Ivor had made a lazy circuit of the hall that connected the rooms, passing bedrooms, dining hall, sitting room, study, library—he took extra time with the library; the paper would feed the fire—and ended back at the salle.

  “They're irrelevant,” Ivor said. Dmitry was silenced.

  Once the blaze had begun, seething in a dozen places, Ivor gestured to Dmitry who took up a stance near the double doors into the main palace.

  “What if they don't release us?” Dmitry asked, showing a distressing lack of trust in Ivor's plan.

  “They will,” Ivor said. “The difficulty lies in escaping this prison but not being shuttled into another.” He dipped another cravat into a water basin, tied it loosely about his face. The smoke twined its way down the hall, wispy but blackening, creating the start of thunderheads beneath the high ceiling.

  Ivor lay back on the chaise, his cravat filtering the air, and waited. Dmitry fidgeted, his composure fleeing. Ivor supposed this was another thing he could lay to Janus's account: the revelation of Dmitry's character. He had thought the man imperturbable, as solid as icebergs in a winter sea. Now, he saw only that the man had never been pressed beyond the known, saw the man was as brittle as rime, all polished sheen and nothing of substance beneath.

  When the tickle in his throat grew nearly breath stealing, Ivor said, “Now, Dmitry, if you would.”

  Dmitry pounded on the double doors, shouted, “Fire!” and coughed. Ivor didn't think the coughing was deliberately added for verisimilitude but rather an involuntary reaction to the thickening smoke.

  The scrape of the outer bar being raised was a sweet sound: It was the one variable Ivor hadn't been able to judge with certainty. Janus might have issued orders to prevent such an escape, ordered them to keep the bar in place for any request out of the ordinary, but Ivor gambled. If the palace was still playing the part of civil host, trotting deliveries and meals in, he thought it likely that the bar would be raised.

  The first guard stuck a wary head in, got a mouthful of smoke, a cindery wash of heat, and stumbled forward. Dmitry brought his dagger into play, stabbing the man in the throat.

  Too soon, Ivor thought, crouched below the worst of the smoke. He risked the door being shut again, leaving them to their fate. But the second and third guards were committed, already partially through the door, and perhaps, in the rush of smoke and flame, they hadn't seen what happened. The door remained open.

  Cooler air swept into the foyer, made twists of the smoky clouds, set them dancing through the marble hall, shattering against drawn swords.

  The doors were still impassable, at least for one bent on escape instead of rescue.

  Ivor picked up a second basin at his feet, the one he'd been chaperoning most carefully, though not for the reason Dmitry assumed. Not a desperate splash of water should straits grow grim. Instead, the basin held the hottest-burning oil in the palace. Without hesitation, he flung it over the guards and Dmitry alike, then snatched a burning book and tossed it after the oil.

  The men ignited in shrieking unison, writhing and twisting, as if they could strip themselves of flame as easily as a man shed his clothes. They fell, rolled, beat at each other and themselves, but the carpets had been saturated in fats and oils, in pomades a
nd perfumes—some of it made a lovely scent as it burned—sage and lilac—mixing with the stench of singed hair and leather.

  Ivor slipped by, impeded briefly by Dmitry's clutch on his boot. He kicked back, then left unscathed save the print of a bloody hand on his heel.

  He heard approaching footsteps: The alert had gone out. He followed his planned route. Catching up a lamp on the wall, he hastened down the stairs toward the stables and Delight's lair. He shattered the lamp at the base, urged the fire to spread. If Delight's machines caught, the blaze would burn long and hard, and likely take the palace with them.

  The burning oil spilled down toward the next flight, laying a thin rivulet of flame that just kissed the base of the stairwell and the straw there. It was the stable entrance, and, no matter how often it was swept, wisps of straw remained.

  He kicked the smoldering straw into the stables ahead of him, marveling as always at the sensitivity of beasts. Already horses were moving uneasily in their stalls. Ivor pulled his cravat back over his face and shouted to the stable hands, “Fire in the palace! Move out the beasts and the carriages!”

  The stable men, hearing no more than the aristocratic voice and the tone of utter conviction, swore and began leading out the horses.

  Ivor left with one of them, coughing, shielding himself behind a stallion's bulk. He ducked away before the guards got more than a glimpse of him—it was easy enough; the guards' attention was all for the smoke trickling through the stables and the white-eyed horses dancing in controlled panic.

  Against that spectacle, one man walking briskly toward the king's gardens was nothing to worry about. Ivor quickened his pace to a steady run when he judged himself out of sight. Time was short. Soon the guards would summon Rue, summon Janus—both of whom would recognize the blaze for what it was, not only an escape, but a distraction.

  The sharp scent of boxwood rose in the night, pungent, unpleasant, letting him know he was close to the maze; from there, it was only another minute's walk past the rose-studded terraces below the nobles' ballroom, past the tree-laden grotto outside the king's ballroom, and then to the lawn leading to the heart of the palace.