The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Read Free Book Online

discovered?”
    “My husband was always Prince Alonzo’s man.”
    So Alexa had been right. “But you fell ill because your husband told you to? And he changed his shift at Alonzo’s orders?”
    She shrugged. “My man came and went.”
    And how would I know which guard shift he pulled?
Tycho could read the question in the flatness of her tone. He had a question of his own. “You knew Prince Leo was to be murdered?”
    “What?”
    “Stabbed through the heart,” Tycho said. “Your replacement gutted. The nursery looks like an abattoir and stinks like a mortuary. I found the child you fed lying dead beneath his upturned cot.”
    Twisting free, she put her hands over her ears, refusing to hear any more.
    “
No
,” she whispered. “
No, no.
”
    Pulling her hands away, Tycho said. “That wasn’t meant to happen?”
    “
Of course not
.” Francesca shook her head fiercely. “Prince Alonzo wanted the child with him so that Mongol bitch couldn’t corrupt the boy. That’s what my husband told me. The Regent wanted to keep Leo safe . . . He’s really dead?”
    “I saw the body.”
    “What will happen to my child?”
    A slaughter for a slaughter?
There were undoubtedly cities and rulers who worked like this. Alexa was more complex and her responses less simple. “He will be looked after. A new family will be found.”
    It was a half-truth. Leo’s body would be buried quietly. The slaughtered nurse would simply disappear. A new room would become Leo’s nursery and a new nurse found for the new Leo, who would remain Giulietta’s child for as long as it took Alexa to decide what should be done.
    “Where is your child?”
    “Sleeping.” Francesca indicated the darkness behind.
    Wooden internal walls, tar paper across the windows, a cheap pine table and two stools. A pile of hay in one corner for a goat brought in from a tiny yard outside. The building would burn readily enough.
    “He will be safe,” Tycho promised.
    “And me . . .?
    She was not the cause
, Tycho reminded himself. Reaching up, he put his hand to her cheek and turned her face until she faced him. “Look into my eyes,” he said. “Look into my eyes and don’t look away.” Her pupils grew huge and fell out of focus. Her eyelids fluttered as she reached the edge of sleep and he felt her body begin to slump. She would have fallen but he caught her, his dog teeth descending as he bit into the nape of her neck.
    As always, the world fell into sharp focus. Had he gone outside the sky would have been blood-red, the stars hard and distant worlds he could freeze into his memory in a single glance. And he would have seen the stars, because they would have been points of heat through the cold of the clouds.
    He was Fallen. The reality of that fact he only remembered now. At other times, he knew it in an abstract way. Here and now, with blood in his throat and flames flaring from him in colours the human eye couldn’t capture he
understood
what it meant. This world was not his world. These people were not his people. Except for him, he doubted
his people
still existed; although he’d made – by simple accident of blood exchanged – one other who acted like him and had his speed and hungers. Dismissing Rosalyn from his memories, Tycho concentrated on Francesca.
    It was a small life but dear.
    A childhood on the edge of the Arzanale, with her father a ropemaker and her mother a servant to Lord Roderigo’s father. A marriage at thirteen to a man who hardly ever beat her and used brothels only rarely. She had three children still living. A daughter of fourteen, already with child, a twelve-year-old boy apprenticed to the Rope Walk, and the infant still sleeping. Those born in the years between were dead of hunger, illness or bad luck. Her life was familiar in shape. A thousand women within a mile of where she lived would recognise it.
    Tycho found no taste of treason.
    There was little sense she’d lied to him and the lies she told herself were no more