The Outcast Blade (14 page)

“Now look,” he hissed.

Dragging the tearful boy to his feet, Tycho raised his hand again and apparently changed his mind, releasing him with a shrug. Just another noble angry with his page. Those watching went back to their business.

“Right. Who is it?”

“Iacopo…” Pietro said unhappily.

“You’re sure Lord Atilo hasn’t forbidden you to visit me?”

“He said what I do on my day off is my own business, but use it well.”

That sounded like Atilo. “Then who is he following?”

Pietro thought about it. “You?”

Atilo’s bodyservant had been above Tycho in Atilo’s household and jealous of the speed at which Tycho learnt
assassini
skills. Knowing the man, Tycho imagined it was a grudge he’d hold for life. He’d worry about that later. He had far more important things to worry about now.

“My lord,” Pietro whispered.

Tycho glanced down.

“Are you unwell? You’re shivering.”

“I’m nervous.”

The boy looked shocked.

At Lady Giulietta’s door, Tycho gave him into the hands of the servant who answered and told her to take him to the kitchens and see he was fed. And to inform Lady Giulietta that Sir Tycho was here.

“If you’ll wait in the hall, my lord. I’ll send someone.”

“I’ll wait out here.”

“My lord…”

“Ask her,” he said. “Say it’s about Leo.”

“You’ve replaced your guards.”

“Hardly surprising.”

Since he’d watched the first two die he guessed it wasn’t.

Lady Giulietta looked as nervous as he felt. Dressed in her widow’s black, she sat stiffly in the middle of the piano nobile, on what had been Prince Leopold’s favourite chair, a high-backed walnut seat with carved arms.

In front of her rested a silver plate, a silver fork and a pie of pigeon pasta with its top removed but the meat untouched.

A single glass glittered in the light of a dozen white candles. For all Leopold had been born a bastard, he’d been born an emperor’s bastard and kept a rich house. All of its contents hers now.

Tycho tried to remember her age.

Fifteen when they met in the cathedral. So either sixteen or already seventeen. In the candlelight and the glitter of her riches she looked both older and far younger. She didn’t ask him to sit or offer him a drink.

“Where’s Leo?”

“Asleep,” Giulietta said. “Why?”

“I was wondering…”

As he looked at her Tycho tried to ignore memories of the first time he’d visited this house. That, of course, simply made him remember them so clearly he might as well have been there.

You’re like Leopold
, Giulietta had said that night.

She’d turned to face him and lifted her baby to hide her breasts.
A beast inside a man. At war with a man inside a beast
.

“No,” Tycho had warned her. “I’m nothing like him.” And wrapping one hand into her hair, he’d dragged back her head until her throat was exposed.

You are
.

He’d bitten savagely, spilling blood across her child and on to her sheets. And as she’d screamed, and Prince Leopold begun to hammer at the door, Tycho had taken the sweetness her life had to offer.

He walked her to the very edge of death.

Addicted himself in the process and completed what began that night in the basilica when she knelt half naked, a knife to her breast before a softly smiling statue of the Virgin. Had he been wrong?

Tycho dug his nails into his hands until they hurt.

Of course he’d been wrong
.

He hadn’t known that then, and the dark and bitter beast that
hid behind the bars of his ribs and broke free to save Giulietta during the battle against the Mamluks, refused to admit it now.

Without him, she would be dead. Now here she sat, watching coldly as if there were no fierce memories between them. As if he really was the
demon
his tales of Bjornvin and its horned enemies made her think

“Why are you here?”

The inverse of the question he’d asked Alonzo, before he and the Regent reached an agreement that Tycho should propose to Giulietta, a suggestion so strange that Tycho wondered which one of them was really using the other. One look at Lady Giulietta’s scowl withered Tycho’s prepared speech in his mouth.

“Well…?”

“Leo needs a father.”

He should have found a better way to say it.

“You’ve come all this way to tell me to accept Frederick? That’s what the Council wants, you know… They want me to marry Leopold’s half-brother, because one emperor’s bastard or another, what’s the difference?” Her voice rose, her temper barely in check. “I suppose Aunt Alexa sent you?”

“I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“The duchess didn’t send me.”

“But you think I should accept Frederick? My uncle does. I thought Aunt Alexa less keen. Probably because Uncle Alonzo likes the idea so much. He likes it, she doesn’t. She likes it, he doesn’t. I’m sick of their games.”

“
Giulietta
, listen.”

She sat back, scowling.

I love you. I can’t survive without you. Our lives were linked from the moment I first saw you
. All the things he’d never told her. How hard would they be to say?

“Well?” she said finally.

“Look, I…” He hesitated. “We were friends once.”

She snorted. With most people, Tycho knew what they were thinking before they thought it. He could read the feelings that burnt off them. He had trouble reading his own thoughts around Giulietta. “Has your aunt trained you?”

“In what? The arts of love?”

“
Giulietta
.”

“Aren’t those what she used to keep my late uncle enslaved? You must have heard the gossip. Is that what you’re asking?”

He’d meant to shield her thoughts.

“Anyway… What business would it be of yours?”

“You don’t have to marry Leopold’s half-brother.”

“
I know that
. I’ve been saying it all week. So why tell me Leo needs a father?”

“Because he does.”

“Well, that’s too bad. His father’s dead.”

“Except Leopold wasn’t his father.”

“
Who told you that?
”

“You did.”

“I lied.”

“Leopold told me also. He wanted to know if the child was mine.”

“As if he would be,” Giulietta said furiously.

Tycho flushed. “Listen,” he said. “Marry me and I’ll be as good a father to him as Leopold was. No one can make you marry Frederick if you’re already married.”

“That’s what you came to say?”

No, what he came to say was,
I love you. Your smile lights my darkness, your scowl makes me hate myself
.

But he’d left the words too late.

“How do you dare…?” Giulietta buried her head in her hands. “Do you really think I’m that stupid?”

“Why would I think that?”

“You think I don’t know you could have saved Leopold?”

“
Giulietta…
”

“You could have saved him.”

“He gave his life for you.”

“
And you let him
.” Her shout was furious. “You saved everyone else, God knows how because we’re not allowed to ask. But you let your
rival
die first. You think I don’t know that?
You let Leopold die
.”

“I didn’t…”

“Yes, you did. I wish you’d let me die too.”

“And your baby?” Tycho said. “You wished I’d let him die too?”

“Yes,” Giulietta said. “I do. You know
nothing
about Leo. Nothing about how… About where I…”

“So tell me.”

Her mouth shut in a tight line of misery.

“Tell me,” he said. “I won’t tell anyone. Whatever happened, whoever’s child he is, I’ll keep your secret.”

“Why would I tell
you
anything?”

“That night on the ship when we…”

“
Don’t you dare use that against me
. You let Leopold’s ship burn. You let him die. You let them all die. Leopold, Sir Richard, his crew. Why didn’t you save him?”

“I couldn’t.”

“
Yes, you could
,” she shouted. “
You just didn’t
.”

The four bronze horses frozen in the act of leaping from the basilica balcony were old, really old. Made by the ancient Greeks and stolen by the Romans, stolen back by Romanised Greeks when Rome was failing, and stolen from them by Venice when it sacked Constantinople two hundred years before now.

Tycho had visited them in his first week in Venice.

They were what carried him up to the balcony that first time. Giulietta’s sobs had been what carried him inside to where she knelt before a statue. This time when he rolled himself over the balcony’s balustrade he landed lightly on his feet to discover he wasn’t alone.

“Well, that was a really stupid idea…”

“Climbing the basilica?”

“Upsetting Giulietta.”

Green eyes held his gaze. The small girl astride the nearest horse smiled mockingly. Her rags were a sail snapping in the wind. Her red hair a torn pennant in the storm that tried to unseat her.

“Tell me it wasn’t stupid.”

Tycho recognised her instantly. The high cheekbones, the emerald eyes, the picked-clean bird’s skull on a thong round
her neck. A’rial was Alexa’s
stregoi
, her child witch from Dalmatia.

“What are
you
doing here?”

“Waiting for you, of course. So predictable.
He follows her here, he follows here there, the poor boy follows her everywhere
. How could you be stupid enough to think any girl would accept an offer like that?”

Tycho had been asking himself the same.

“You think she hates you already? How’s she going to feel when she discovers you went as Alonzo’s errand boy?”

How did A’rial…?

“Asked yourself why he wants you to marry her?”

“The Regent told me. Sigismund is…”

“His
real
reasons. The ones that reduce a Millioni prince to begging favours from an ex-slave. Maybe you should consider those?”

“He’s not begging.”

“Gods.” A’rial’s green eyes hardened. “You think he regards having to deal with you as anything else? He’s a Millioni and you’re a freak.”

“Leopold was no better.”

“Gods, still upset he had your girl first?”

“He never had her.”

A’rial sighed. “So simple. So simplistic. So unwilling to live up to his talents. You promised Alexa an army of immortals. You promised me a kill of my choosing. Now look at you, weeping like a girl in the rain. Just because Leopold…”

“I saw her first.”

“
I saw her first…
”

Tycho knew the mockery in her words was deserved. He still hated A’rial for it, though. He could leave Venice behind him. Abandon his life here and start again somewhere else. Where?

Beyond Dalmatia…?

Where could he go the moon didn’t swell each month to birth
his terrifying hunger? His current choices were kill, buy blood, which he now realised carried a risk in leaving the person he bought from alive, or ride out his hunger in self-captivity.

This was not living.

But then some days he doubted he was really alive.

When he looked up A’rial was gone. The horses and the night wind, the rain and the chant of plainsong from inside the cathedral were still there but Alexa’s little
stregoi
was not.

What did she want?

Did he mean A’rial or Giulietta?

Tycho wasn’t even sure which he meant, as if that even mattered. He’d failed Alonzo and ruined his chances with Giulietta, Alexa’s
stregoi
had turned up to give him a warning he was too stupid to understand, and that probably meant Alexa knew he’d failed too.

Unless A’rial was acting on her own?

Yes, that was possible…

Wiping rain and tears from his eyes, Tycho glared around him. Bjornvin had been hell. This felt the same, simply with better food and scenery, unless the hell was him and he carried the darkness inside?

The more he thought about it, the more he decided Alexa didn’t know.

He would ride out this week’s pregnant moon locked away in the printing works with their back-to-front engraving plates of Millioni deceit and Republican virtue that came gifted with his house, and then he would visit her.

Tell Alexa exactly what he’d done.

Around suppertime, Alexa decided the third Wednesday of August was turning into the strangest of days. Her niece, already reclusive, now refused to answer letters. A summons sent that morning to attend her aunt had been returned, unbelievably enough, by the messenger sent to deliver it. Asked why, the man stammered some excuse about no one answering the door.

Alexa had him whipped, obviously.

And then there was Alonzo… A day’s worth of drunken fury last week had spawned forty-eight hours of hangover and sulking, followed by this week’s skulking in corners with Lords Roderigo and Bribanzo. This morning Roderigo and the Regent had left the palace together, with all the subtlety of men wearing signs reading
plotting
round their necks.

That Roderigo was on Alonzo’s side worried her. The customs office taxed the goods that flowed in and out of the city, remitting the money to the treasury. All it would take was for their captain to tell his men to remit the money straight to the Regent and Alexa’s life would become very complicated indeed.

She really did need to know what was going on.

Closing her shutters against the late sun, Alexa poured water
from a silver jug into her jade bowl and shut her eyes and concentrated on what she wanted her magic to reveal to her when she opened them again. So she was surprised to discover the reflection showed Atilo’s servant, Iacopo.

At the very least she’d been expecting Roderigo.

She let her fingers brush the water and Iacopo’s face trembled. The table he sat at was clean and the unfilled glass in front of him expensive. So not a common hostelry, then. Maybe this boy was the key to Alonzo’s fury?

Only Iacopo was no longer a boy.

He had a beard and armour, and had dressed himself in his best clothes for whomever he was meeting. But he looked like a boy to Alexa. And, as he sat there, nervously shuffling his feet and talking to himself, she felt almost sorry for him. How terrible to be a pawn in someone else’s game.