The Assassini

Customs officers board a galley in a harbor and overpower its guards. In the hold they find oil and silver, and a naked boy chained to the bulkhead. The officers break the boy's chains to rescue him, but he escapes… Duke Alonzo commands the seas, taxes his colonies, and, like every duke before him, fears assassins better than his own. In a side chapel, Alonzo's 13-year old cousin prays for deliverance from her forced marriage. When Moorish pirates break in to steal a chalice, they kidnap her and demand ransom from the Duke.

As the Byzantine and German emperors plot war, Venice’s future rests in the hands of three unwilling individuals: The newly knighted Sir Tycho. He defeated the Mamluk navy but he cannot make the woman he loves love him back. The grieving Lady Giulietta. Virgin. Mother. Widow. All she wants is to retire from the poisonous world of the Venetian court to mourn her husband in peace. And lastly, a naked, mud-strewn girl who crawls from a paupers’ grave on an island in the Venetian lagoon and begins by killing the men who buried her.

A violent attack on Lady Giulietta’s son forces Tycho from his new-found happiness and back into the treacherous intrigue of the court. For Giulietta’s sake he would go to the world’s end to track down those responsible. As Venice teeters on the brink of civil war, its feuding families prepare to discover who is a player and who a pawn in the coming struggle for power. The Exiled Blade is the climactic finale to Tycho’s story.