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

was a new guard, never mind learnt his name, noticed his hair or discovered his wife was pregnant. She imagined there was a purpose to Marco’s words and he’d reach it soon.
    “Think about it,” Marco said impatiently. “Are there midwives in heaven? Will some women in heaven be pregnant for eternity? Are there going to be births, and babies and breast-feeding and nappies? We’ll know the world’s going to end when women stop getting pregnant.”
    “Who told you that?” Alexa demanded.
    “Worked it out for myself.” Marco rewarded himself by raising the leather flap over the side window and sticking his head into the wind like a dog on a barge. The crowds on both banks erupted with excitement and Alexa stopped trying to pull him back inside again.
    “He’s changing,” Giulietta risked saying.
    “You’ve noticed it too?” The duchess’s gaze sharpened.
    Giulietta wondered what Aunt Alexa would do if she discovered her son’s idiocy was a disguise adopted in childhood to protect him from Alonzo, her brother-in-law. Would she blame Uncle Alonzo? Would she decide it was her own fault? Or would she take it out on those who already knew this? Lady Giulietta had no intention of being the one to find out. Only, the question she did ask earned her such a glare she might as well have talked about Marco anyway. All she did was wonder aloud how her aunt knew about Prince Frederick’s arrival.
    “Which one is he?” Lady Giulietta demanded.
    Aunt Alexa looked at her.
    “We’ve never met. Remember?” Giulietta didn’t want to revisit the night her lady-in-waiting was killed by an arrow meant for this boy, the night Marco revealed to her that he wasn’t the idiot prince his subjects thought. She scanned Germans and saw a large, broad-shouldered young man in a wolf-fur coat looking entirely too pleased with himself. “That one?”
    “No,” Alexa said. “Over there.”
    A narrow-shouldered youth was climbing from the last coach and looking nervously around him. He stamped the ice as if three carriages, five horses and a dozen people weren’t test enough of its strength. Turning, he noticed Lady Giulietta staring and hesitated. She watched him force himself to approach – and somewhere in the handful of steps between his carriage and where she stood his face changed, losing its nervousness and filling with a terrible sadness.
    He stopped, and reached for her hand. Lady Giulietta expected him to kiss it, but he simply held it for a few seconds longer than he should then let it go. He looked as if he wanted to hug her and didn’t quite dare. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Really sorry. I know how it feels.”
    “Your highness?”
    “To lose a child . . .”
    He should be paying his respects to Duke Marco, or kissing Aunt Alexa’s hand, but his eyes were for her and they were brown, intense and bright as cut agate. His face was raw with sadness.
    “Who said anything about a child?” Giulietta demanded.
    “Our spies say Leo is dead and a substitute takes his place.” The boy looked beyond Giulietta to the scowling duchess. “At least, until your aunt decides her next move. It must be brutal having to pretend.” His beautiful brown eyes filled with tears. “
Prince Frederick . . .
” The Duchess Alexa stepped forward.
    “I was married,” Frederick said simply. Maybe he read Giulietta’s thoughts that said he was too young to have lost a wife and child. No one had told her this when he was mentioned as one of her suitors. “Your wife died in childbirth?”
    “Plague.” The prince gulped and Giulietta realised how much it hurt him to talk of it. “I was thirteen and she was fifteen. My father wanted to cement an alliance and . . .”
    Yes, Giulietta knew how that worked.
    “Annemarie,” Frederick said. “We fell in love.” His shrug said stranger things had happened. “And she had a child a year after we married.”
    “A boy?”
    “A girl. While I was on campaign, plague swept the castle