The Outcast Blade (30 page)

“It’s almost daylight,” Rosalyn said. “I should go…”

“Stay a little longer.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Tell me about home.”

Lady Eleanor liked Rosalyn’s stories about her family. The father who cut wood on the lower slopes of the mountains. The mother who cooked badly but endlessly. Her brother who wanted to learn to be a carpenter. The little wooden house they lived in outside Alta Mofacon. Rosalyn worried what would happen if her new friend discovered they weren’t true. She kept telling them all the same.

Rosalyn liked them, too.

“Tomorrow night.”

“No, now.”

“Hush,” Rosalyn said.

“
Why?
”

“Because someone’s coming.”

The girl lying on the bed next to her froze. “They’d have to be coming from Lady Giulietta’s room.”

Rosalyn nodded.

A grin lit Eleanor’s lips, and she began rolling off the bed until Rosalyn grabbed her. “We’ll be caught,” she said.

Eleanor stopped struggling. “I can’t hear anything.”

“You wouldn’t.” Rosalyn smiled to soften her words. “And I know whose footsteps they are. I recognise them.”

“You can recognise footsteps?”

“Those ones.”

Having rolled off the bed, she darted back to give Eleanor a goodbye-for-now hug, grinned at Eleanor’s answering grin, and followed Tycho down a flight of stairs through a pre-dawn others would have considered darkness.

Her steps matched his exactly and Rosalyn was proud of that.

Everything he’d been taught by Lord Atilo he was teaching her. She was surprised, all the same, he didn’t notice. Although not as surprised as the fact he used the stairs at all. Something
must have changed that he would come from Giulietta’s bedroom so openly.

And something had changed for her. As Rosalyn made her way down a twist of stairs towards the cellars she realised she felt almost shockingly happy. She should have known it couldn’t last.

Tycho woke at dusk from dreamlessness into the dusty darkness of a brick vault that fed from an empty wine cellar into a stocked wine cellar, a vast meat locker and two rooms containing brick-lined pits used for grain. In the middle of the empty wine cellar was a low well, capped with an old millstone.

The footprint of the cellars under the manor of Alta Mofacon matched the floor plan above. With the manor’s heavy walls, arrow slit external windows and huge underground storage capacity it would be possible to withstand a siege.

None of this mattered to Tycho.

He knew instantly that Mofacon was empty. It
sounded
empty. Scrabbling upright, he cursed the bladder that left him hard and pissed awkwardly, not worried that Rosalyn was waking. “Quiet,” he hissed.

Behind him Rosalyn froze.

He could hear no sounds beyond the door.

Somewhere overhead footsteps crossed oak boards. A single pair of stolid feet.
Not empty then, just emptier…
The front door opened and he heard low conversation, too far away to pick out
words but the person talking sounded upset rather than panicked. That was something.

Turning, he found Rosalyn behind him.

She’d moved quietly and grinned as he smiled his approval. Their relationship was changing. She’d hated him for getting her killed. Now she seemed grateful he’d been the instrument to bring her back.

“We’re locked in?”

Tycho tried the door to confirm it. The lock was turned and the key missing from its slot. Enough of a gap showed between door and frame to reveal that both outside bolts had been slammed into place. The lock plate was thick, the door strong and the hinges almost new. They needed another way out.

“There’s an air shaft.”

“Go,” Tycho said. “Find me the key.”

She became smoke; a twist of dark velvets flowing through the gloom to sweep upwards, leaving a falling trickle of dust behind her. Alone in the cellar Tycho considered what could have happened and found no answers.

Had he scared Giulietta away? She would have told him if she was planning to leave, surely? Either way she’d have left the cellar unlocked, since she alone in her household knew that was where two people slept. Every second of every minute of the previous evening replayed in his brain.

He swallowed the images, froze the memories.

Turned them around inside his head and looked at them from different angles. Seeing himself as someone else, someone treading so carefully not to make happen what had seemed to have happened. Giulietta fleeing.

Unless it was worse. Unless the
krieghund
…

His throat tightened at the thought and he inhaled deeply, tasting dust and damp and stale air. The scent he was afraid of finding was missing. No rank if distant smell of death to say her servants had been slaughtered.

A scrape beyond the cellar door told him Rosalyn had found the key. A click of the lock was followed by the crash of two bolts being shot back. “No one saw me,” she said before he could ask.

The huge hall was deserted.

A broken cart stood in the darkened courtyard. Blood had dried on the front door’s lintel. Dropping to a crouch, Tycho winced at its staleness. Not Giulietta’s, which was all that worried him.

“Bring me someone.”

Rosalyn nodded.

“Quietly.”

She came back with a small child.

Snot-nosed and willing to stop sobbing once it realised nothing bad would happen. Marco worked in the kitchens. His mother was a scullery maid, his father long dead. Everyone except his mother and the cook, the steward and a groom had returned home, not being needed.

“Where’s Lady Giulietta?”

Marco said her family had taken her.

Unpacked, that meant soldiers had arrived with orders for her immediate return to Venice. The great lord who brought the order sounded like Roderigo. When Giulietta refused he said he had orders to bring her anyway. That was when Giulietta’s sergeant stepped forward. His was the blood on the sill.

“Who gave orders to lock the cellar doors?”

“The steward, after my lady left.”

Lord Roderigo had arrived at dawn with a small crowd of cavalry behind him. He brought a letter from the Council and spare horses for Ladies Giulietta and Eleanor. The others in Giulietta’s retinue would have to make their own way back. The galley in the harbour couldn’t be expected to wait for them.

“Who’s in the house now?”

The steward was out, apparently. The groom had gone to the
tavern. The cook was getting drunk in the kitchens. And his mother… The boy stopped to glare at Tycho.

“No one’s going to hurt her.”

She was tending the sergeant who’d been hurt trying to protect my lady. She’d asked the groom to help carry the injured man to her quarters. It sounded to Tycho as if she and the sergeant might have met before.

The door to Lady Giulietta’s bedroom was unlocked. Her three-mattress bed was still there. Although the feather upper mattress lay rolled for safekeeping. Nothing was rolled in its middle. So Tycho tried a chest and found old blankets and a mildewed bear pelt. Her money chests were gone, obviously returned with her. The
WolfeSelle
he already carried on his back.

So why did he think she…?

Tycho found what called him in an alcove behind a tapestry. The original of the ring Marco used to wed the sea. Threaded through it and tied in a bow was a neck ribbon from Giulietta’s nightgown. The boy went wide-eyed when Tycho slid the ring on to his finger and tied the ribbon round his wrist.

“We weren’t here. Understand me?”

“It’s a secret?”

“Lady Giulietta’s secret.”

Her name was enough to make the boy nod fiercely.

“Now go and do whatever you’re meant to be doing and promise me not to tell anyone about this…”

“Atilo would have killed him,” Rosalyn said.

“I’m not Atilo.”

From the twist of Rosalyn’s lips when she looked back to where the boy stood at the top of the unlit corridor he knew she saw her own brother in the small boy. A happier, safer, less damaged version. The boy Pietro could have been.

“He probably lives in a wooden house outside Alta Mofacon,” Rosalyn said. “He’s going to grow up to be a carpenter.”

Tycho looked at her.

Adjusting the
WolfeSelle
on his shoulder, he checked the leather straps that held the soul of the Wolf Brothers in place and made sure the courtyard was empty. Then he slid into the darkness and heard a rustle as Rosalyn joined him.

A streak of blood still lit the far horizon.

It would fade within minutes, paling through blues to the black of a cloud-filled sky. He missed the sun. How perverse was that? He missed the thing that could kill him and hoarded memories of kinder days.

“Are you all right?” Rosalyn asked.

“Remembering.”

She had the sense not to ask
what?

“Can you run in that?” Her long, dark gown looked shadow-black in the darkness under the arch of the deserted gatehouse. “Run?”

“A ship will be too slow and booking passage too complicated. We take the shore.” Besides, they both hated water.

“Tycho…”

He knew she was serious. Rosalyn hardly ever used his name.

“You’re an outlaw. If you’re captured they’ll kill you.”

“If I don’t kill them first.”

“It’s not a joke.”

“I’m not joking.”

She looked at him and her face was thoughtful.

She seemed older so Tycho took another look. No, just cleaner, better dressed, her hair somehow different.

“Could you?” she asked “Kill a city?”

For Giulietta? He could certainly try.

Biting into his wrist, Tycho offered it to the girl and watched sudden hunger banish the softness he’d just noticed. She drank fast, his fingers tightening in her hair in warning she’d taken enough.

“Now me,” he said.

Grabbing her wrist Tycho fed in turn, tasting his blood in hers. The night brightened around him, the courtyard fell into sharp focus around him. High overhead the stars flared and glittered.

“What now?”

“We run…”

Forested slopes fell away to ploughed fields as they passed the tree line. Below this lay towns, orchards, hop fields and finally shore. They ran south-west through a fishing village and past drying racks, with the sea to their right and a plain on their left. Scrub broke the fields, rice paddies had been dug here and there. Then marsh grass whipped them, and splashed under their feet as fertile farmland gave way to a salt wilderness of runt bushes and crippled trees.

The run was placeless and timeless. For the first time he could remember Tycho belonged to this space and state of being on the edge of everything, being between this everything and everything else.

Then an expanse of inland water glittered in front of him and lights showed through the shutters of a fisherman’s hut on stilts. The air smelt of smoke, brine and salted mackerel and mullet.

“That was fast.”

“Laguna di Grado,” said Tycho, remembering the map he’d seen in his first weeks in Venice. “Not halfway yet.”

Rosalyn grinned.

They faltered only once when a path beyond twisted back on itself to deliver them to where they’d already been. A woman sat in the shadow of a fish-drying rack, one breast protruding from a white pearl-buttoned gown. At her nipple was a crow wrapped in seaweed. Its beady eyes regarded Tycho coldly.

“Who are you?” Rosalyn demanded.

“I should ask that of you.”

Switching her attention to Tycho, she added. “Be careful the
weights you choose to carry. You will not be allowed to put them down.”

He stared at her.

“You wear my ring. You run my shore. You will fight a man who claims to be my mage… My sister talks of you.”

“Your sister?”

“A’rial. She says you are Marco’s…”

The last words Tycho heard were
grievous angel
, said in a tone so sly it was hard to know if it held amusement or contempt.

This time the same path led onwards.

So they jumped marsh pools and tidal rivulets, landing on swaying tussocks, before leaping for firmer ground beyond. Filled with the power that feeding on each other gave them. When marsh turned to track they increased their speed.

Eighty miles separated Alta Mofacon from Venice and he and Rosalyn covered half of that with barely a stop. A wild fowlers’ camp approached and disappeared behind, an arrow failing to catch them as they raced away. Water appeared on both sides as they reached the spit circling Venice’s lagoon.

If he couldn’t escape his fate he’d run towards it instead.

“Lights,” Rosalyn said.

And people. A small group around a battered boat drawn up on a mud bank. They swirled as Tycho approached, daggers in their hands. Their courage vanishing as he yanked the
WolfeSelle
from his shoulder.

“My lord,” said a man who held a light. “We’re simple fishermen.”

“And those bolts of silk in your boat are fish?”

The man’s face slackened. Behind him Tycho heard one of his company swear and another begin to take slow steps as he tried to blind-side the newcomers.

“I wouldn’t,” Rosalyn said.

From the way the companion went still she had her dagger
to his back and was prodding firmly enough to guarantee his attention.

“What’s the news from Venice?”

“News, my lord?”

Tycho growled in irritation. “What is happening in the city?”

“A feast,” the man said. “At the palace.”

“Huge,” one of the other men agreed.

Tycho wanted to say there was always a feast. Half the time it seemed all the nobles in Venice did was eat, drink and bed each other’s wives.

“That’s where we’re going,” Rosalyn said.

Tycho glanced at her.

She smiled. “My master needs to reach Venice as swiftly as possible. You can take him and he’ll pay. Or we can kill you now.”

They chose their lives and saved Tycho the trouble of trying to sail a boat himself, the very thought of which made him sick. He had them scatter earth in the boat’s bottom, rip a single length of cloth from the silk, fill that with dirt and put the makeshift cushion on the boat’s cross-slat.