51

A knock at the door made Giulietta look up from the baby at her breast.

When she didn’t answer, the door opened slowly and Prince Leopold put his head round. “May I come in, my lady?”

“I’ve told you,” she said. “You don’t need to knock.”

“You might have been feeding Leo.”

“I was,” she said. Smiling, she folded back her gown and stroked her child’s cheek until his mouth opened and he returned to his hungry nuzzling. When Giulietta returned her gaze to Leopold, he was staring pointedly through a window at red-earthed Cypriot fields outside.

“Something interesting?”

“Farmers cutting barley on the upper slopes.”

Their friendship was sometimes fragile. So much now unspoken.

Leopold and she shared a bed, sleeping together when the baby let either of them sleep, which was more often now than in the first few months following his birth. She could have had a wet nurse; in fact, Leopold offered to have one found for her. He seemed resigned to the fact she refused. Yet he knocked at the door before entering and looked away when she fed her child.

Such delicacy was at odds with the cursed thing he’d become on the roof of Ca’ Friedland. And at odds with the savagery of the battle she’d witnessed in Cannaregio.

The fight against the Assassini was more than a year gone, but its memory still made her shiver.

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” she promised.

“About that boy,” Leopold said sadly.

“Leopold… I swear. He doesn’t even enter my head.”

It was a lie. There were moments, usually on the far side of midnight, when she woke certain the silver-haired boy from the basilica was in her room, watching her as she slept. He never was, of course.

“I saw how you looked at him.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes,” Leopold said. “It is. And I saw how he looked at you. You think he let us go because of me? If you hadn’t appeared I’d be dead. He let you go, and he let me go with you.”

“I love you.”

Tears were building in Giulietta’s eyes.

“And I love you,” he said. “In my way. But you dream of him. It’s as if you had one soul between you, and someone cut it down the middle. Remember, you told me how the child wasn’t Marco’s…”

“Leo, please stop.”

“Is the baby his?”

Giulietta’s mouth shut in misery.

Prince Leopold returned that evening carrying a Maltese lace shawl, half a dozen early figs and a bowl of sorbet—white wine mixed with lemon juice and crushed ice—as peace offering and apology. “I’m sorry,” he said, placing his presents on a table and turning to go.

“You can stay.”

“I’ll only say something else stupid.”

“All the same…” Giulietta patted the seat beside her. “You know,” she said, “at the court in Venice they talked of your silver tongue. My aunt was furious at the number of her ladies-in-waiting…”

“Whose heads I’d turned?” Leo said, offering her a fig.

“Although maybe she was cross about other things,” Giulietta admitted. “But I didn’t know about you being krieghund then. But your reputation…”

“Around you, my tongue turns to lead.”

She smiled. “Not always.” Leaning her head against his shoulder, she let him fold his arm around her. Their companionable silence lasted for the time it took a candle to burn out. And then, when Leopold stood to light another from the guttering wick of the first, Giulietta rearranged her gown. “So it’s true about the Mamluk sultan gathering a fleet?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The barley. They’re gathering it against a coming siege.”

“Possibly.”

“Leopold, where did you get the ice for the sorbet?”

“From the last of the king’s own supply.”

“Exactly,” Giulietta said. “I hear he’s also drinking his best wine and sharing out the pickles the kitchens usually keep for banquets.”

“What are you saying?” Leopold asked, fixing the candle into a holder and turning to face her.

“What will happen if the sultan does attack?”

“We’ll fight.”

“And will we win?”

When he came to sit beside her, wrapped his arm round her shoulder and kissed her gently on the forehead, she knew the answer was no. Instead of protesting or asking Leopold to lie, she snuggled against him and tried to frame the question she wanted to ask. The fact he said nothing meant he knew… If not that she was wondering about a question, then that she was thinking.

Thinking time when you had a new baby was rare.

Well, it was if you insisted on feeding the child yourself and letting it sleep in the same room. A decision so odd, Giulietta knew she’d become a talking point among the ladies of the court. If she hadn’t been one already.

“Leopold.”

“Yes?” he said, sounding ready for whatever she wanted say.

He really did know her, Giulietta realised. Their shared time here meant he knew her better than any man had. Maybe better than any other would. Leopold knew her weaknesses. These, he insisted, were fewer than she imagined. And her strengths, which, he told her she underestimated daily. He knew her so well she wondered if he knew what was on her mind.

“If we lose…”

“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”

She kissed him on the cheek. Not knowing the right response to a man you’ve just asked to kill you rather than let you be taken prisoner. When the man promising loves you, despite the fact, if you’re honest, you dream of someone else.

The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini
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