Free The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page A

the second slab. He didn’t bother to pull back the shroud this time. “The last duke had a natural daughter by one of his mistresses and kept it from your aunt. The girl was sent to the mainland and Alexa doubts she even knew her parentage.”
    “Why would he go to this much trouble?”
    Tycho found himself on the edge of saying something he’d never put into words for her before. Giulietta knew – how could she not? – he’d drunk her blood the night he spared Prince Leopold’s life, having tasted a single drop months before when he found her in the basilica. Since she was too tired to understand how he sensed sound and colours and smell, and he barely understood that himself, and he couldn’t bring himself to admit her blood was an addiction, he simply told her different people’s blood smelt differently to him. Hers made him drunk. This woman . . .
    “There’s a family likeness?” See, he knew she was quick.
    “She was killed so I’d smell Millioni blood . . . I’d rush into Leo’s nursery, smell Millioni blood and see the baby’s scar. I’d believe the child was yours.”
    Picking up the lamp, Tycho edged Giulietta towards the stairs and turned for a final look. A woman and a child killed to tie together a plot Alexa still needed to unpick and he needed to stop. The Millioni left death in their wake. All powerful families did.
Am I worse because I kill face to face?
    Venice had its Blades, other kings and cities had their own assassins, less good in Venice’s opinion, and in this the city was right. Atilo had trained his followers well and Tycho was the best of them. He’d failed in this, though. It didn’t matter that the child was in Leo’s gown, in Leo’s cot, and had Leo’s scar.
    You should have made sure.
    “Uncle Alonzo’s going to claim Leo for his own, isn’t he? That’s why he married Maria Dolphini. Why she was bundled in that coat. That’s why she went with him when anyone sensible would have stayed at home.”
    “Yes . . .” It was the only way Leo’s abduction made sense. Alonzo couldn’t keep the child openly without making an even worse enemy of Alexa. And, while having him killed would have been a decisive and irrevocable decision, and Alonzo liked decisive and irrevocable, he
was
the child’s father. Only he could hardly claim parentage of an infant produced under the directions of an alchemist excommunicated by the Pope. But if Alonzo presented the child as Maria’s . . .
    It was brilliant. As his heir by Maria Dolphini, the daughter of one of the richest and most ambitious nobles in Venice, the child’s future was gilded. Alonzo could count on Dolphini money to carry him to the throne. The thought of Maria Dolphini as duchess and her son as heir would guarantee that.

13
    Hunger ate at his stomach. Simple hunger, the kind that wanted food not blood, ate at his gut and Tycho realised it was hours since he had eaten. He still wore the clothes he’d thrown on after he sent the forger’s daughter away, and a bleak hope had driven him to Leo’s nursery looking for certainty.
    He found the kitchens lit red from the embers of the fire pit and almost tripped over a sleepy boy crouched beside a bread oven. He almost tripped over the boy because he was looking beyond the oven to where Duke Marco sat at a table scraping black off a burnt pastry he’d taken from a bin. Beside the duke rested a fishing net on a pole, the kind used by children to catch sprats.
    “You were l-longer t-than I expected,” said Marco, pushing half the pastry across. Tycho was hungry enough to take it and eat.
    “Giulietta wanted to talk, highness.”
    The duke sat with his knees pulled up to his chin and the fingers of his left hand endlessly twisted his curls into tight knots. He was so sleepy his head kept dropping forward and jerking upright. “Of c-course she d-did. I imagine she w-wants you to s-stay here?”
    How did he know that?
Tycho had imagined Lady Giulietta would want him to fetch