The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini Read Free Page A

forthcoming marriage? This is unexpected, but welcome.”
    “Not so much forthcoming, Bribanzo, as immediate. I go to the basilica now. Come with me and be my witness.”
    Lord Bribanzo looked flattered.
    The Regent owed him several thousand gold ducats, and undoubtedly hoped to put off repaying the loan for some while yet. Tycho watched Prince Alonzo and Bribanzo leave together and saw three Council members follow after. Turning, he found Alexa beside him.
    “Find my niece,” she said, “escort her to the basilica.” Seeing Tycho’s expression, she added, “Alonzo is a prince of Serenissima, the late duke’s brother and the new duke’s uncle. She will be there to see him marry, so will Marco, whether they want to or not. We will all be there.”
    We will all be there
. . . Tycho took the words out of the chamber and along a servants’ corridor he used to pass discreetly through Ca’ Ducale, the Millioni’s palace overlooking Piazza San Marco. He’d been born an orphan, and the discovery of that had been a relief, since he hated the bitch he’d believed his mother. Now he had a girl who loved him, who had a baby who loved her. While Alexa, who had every reason to hate him, since he had arrived in Venice with the sole purpose of killing her, included him when she spoke of we.
    He was still smiling when he reached Lady Giulietta’s door. If they were a few minutes late in arriving and Giulietta seemed a little breathless . . . Well, they were young and what could anyone expect?

3
    When the patriarch called San Marco “Europe’s most beautiful basilica”, he wasn’t simply pandering to Venetian pride. By the year of Our Lord 1408 there had been a church on the site of San Marco for six hundred years; admittedly not the same church, and the basilica had been rebuilt, extended, had new domes and new frescos until few could imagine what the original must have looked like, but there had been a church and it had been famously beautiful even back then. Now the wedding congregation stood before a flamboyantly jewelled rood screen, beneath a stern-faced Christ, while a fretted brass censor swung overhead beneath the largest of the five domes. Venice was once a colony of Constantinople, and it showed in the basilica’s Eastern architecture.
    Lady Giulietta had never doubted it was beautiful, for all it was from here she’d been abducted the night before she left to marry King Janus of Cyprus, a marriage that never happened. Since Janus had been a Black Crucifer and his previous marriage had been
complicated
, she was glad.
    “You’re safe,” Tycho whispered.
    “What?”
    “You shivered.”
    Folding her fingers into his, she gripped tight and smiled when he turned to watch her, nodding at the couple before the rood screen to say he should be watching them instead. For once her uncle had discarded his breastplate. His bride huddled inside a huge fur coat against the cold. The coat was made from the pelt of a brown bear, and legend had it that Alonzo stabbed the bear himself. Legend also said he gutted the animal, ate its heart and skinned its carcase, washing its bloody pelt in a stream as clear and cold as ice.
    The problem with Uncle Alonzo was that it could be true.
    His bravery in battle was renowned and his skills as a general had brought him fame before she was born. Had Uncle Marco not died and his idiot son become duke, Uncle Alonzo would be happily besieging a castle somewhere. It was Aunt Alexa who said Alonzo fought the bear hand to hard. That he hadn’t claimed it himself only made Giulietta believe it more. Still, the bearskin made a weird wedding dress. So large and bulky, almost as if Maria was trying to hide something.
    Lady Giulietta nudged Tycho. “Don’t you think Maria looks . . .”
    “Like a girl who needs to get married in a hurry?”
    She shushed him. Maria was a few years older than them, so somewhere in her early twenties; the ideal of beauty, heavy breasted and full-hipped, with long