The Outcast Blade (5 page)

“As I said. I’m yours to command.”

Sigismund sighed. “You are to marry Lady Giulietta di Millioni and bring Venice into the empire.”

“Leopold’s widow?”

“I’m sorry. But if you don’t marry her a Byzantine prince will. The Basilius will acquire a base in Italy. We can’t risk that.”

When Lady Desdaio had taught Tycho his letters the previous year she had done so because she had been impressed by his keenness to learn and the effort he put into his studies. That was what she told him anyway. How was she to know that he’d learnt to read for one reason only?

He’d learnt to read so he could study a manuscript stolen from a book maker in the days immediately after his arrival in Venice. A manuscript he’d now read so many times he could recite the words by heart; although reciting them brought him no closer to understanding how what the words said was true could be.

Tycho had kept the script hidden in the floor of the cellar at Ca’ il Mauros, Lord Atilo’s house, to which he’d insisted on returning while his new house in San Aponal was cleared at the duchess’s orders.

Sometimes Tycho felt he recognised enough of the story in the manuscript for it to be his story. And other times he decided what he thought he recognised was so impossible it must be the story of someone else.

Slowly – because Tycho still read slowly, although he no longer needed to use his finger to follow the lines – he read the words
aloud and listened to them echo off the walls of the little cellar that had once been his slave quarters.

In a year when the world turned colder, and canals froze in Venice, blizzards smothered a town beyond a huge ocean no longship had crossed for more than a hundred years. The blizzard almost buried the woman approaching the gates of the last Viking settlement in Vineland. She had walked an ice bridge from Asia. Not this winter. Not even the one before
.

She was at Bjornvin’s walls before the gate slave saw her. His orders were to admit no one. He would have obeyed, too. But she raised an angelic face framed by black hair. Even at that distance, he could see she had amber-flecked eyes
.

Without intending, he descended the ladder from the walls, removed the crossbar from the gate and opened it…

The scribe was Sir John Mandeville’s squire who’d travelled with his master across the whole known world. The story of Bjornvin’s fall came from a bitter-faced crone with a withered arm far beyond Muscovy, who told it to a Franciscan envoy to the Khan, who had his own scribe record it.

The Franciscan later told a Benedictine friar who told Sir John, who remembered it well enough to dictate it to his squire. The events in the manuscript happened over a hundred years before.

Food became rare in the year the stranger arrived. The snows melted later and arrived earlier, fell for longer and lay deep. Lord Eric and his warriors grew used to making do with less food. His slaves starved. And the oldest, Withered Arm, was weak before her contractions began
.

It was a bad birth. Any birth was bad in winter, in the slave quarters, with no light, when the mother was cold and hungry, but this one was worse. The child had turned inside her. Mothers died of such injuries. Babies died too
.

“Let me look. I have skill…”

“Lady. It’s not right.”

Had anybody heard, Withered Arm would have been whipped for her politeness. They were slaves. But she’d shown the stranger a respect she’d never shown anyone else. Also pregnant, but not so close to term, the stranger lifted Withered Arm’s smock with casual disregard for what the older woman wanted. As they thought, the cord was round the infant’s neck. “Your child’s dead,” the stranger said
.

“I can feel it kicking.”

“As good as dead. You have a knife?”

“Under the straw.”

“Keep steady,” she ordered. Casually, she edged the blade down her wrist to where her fingers ended. “It’s done.”

Withered Arm sobbed. She knew
.

The stranger hid the butchered scraps under straw, having tied off the cord, and waited for the afterbirth. “Now my turn.”

“Lady?”

Although Lord Eric had a wife, mistresses and slaves to bed no woman had given him a child. He’d claimed the stranger as his slave and took her pregnancy so badly he flogged her himself. She hadn’t changed her story. She was pregnant when she arrived. Her kind simply took longer
.

“For my child to become yours we need my baby now.”

“You’ll die.”

“I welcome it.”

“And when Lord Eric asks why I didn’t stop you?”

Denied the pleasure of killing the stranger’s child, Lord Eric would slaughter Withered Arm without thought
.

“Come here,” the stranger ordered
.

She punched Withered Arm without warning. Hard enough to blacken her eye and start it swelling. Before Withered Arm could retreat, she did it again. “I had that knife. We fought. You couldn’t stop me.” She nodded towards the blood-soaked scraps under the straw. “That was my baby. This is yours. Understand?”

Without waiting for a reply she began to cut open her belly
.

It couldn’t possibly be him. Yet how could it not? Tycho’s memories of Bjornvin were too vivid, his hatred of a woman with a withered arm who’d allow him to believe she was his mother too fierce.

Folding the parchment, Tycho wrapped it in oilcloth and added it to his small pile of possessions. He suspected he’d learnt all he could from its words. If he wanted to find out who he was – although he suspected the real question was
what
he was – he’d have to find other ways to do it. Tomorrow, or the day after, he would leave Atilo’s house for ever and the parchment would go with him, a talisman of sorts. But first there was the Victory feast.

The tables set to celebrate the defeat of the Mamluks filled Ca’ Ducale’s new banqueting hall; a room so new it stank of turpentine, brick dust and plaster, and so vast it was said to be the largest in Europe.

Pity it’s not finished
, Tycho thought sourly.

Scaffolding still covered one wall. The ceiling beams were held up at one end with props. The ceiling itself, which would be carved and painted, and hung below the beams had yet to be made.

Everyone in Venice was finding their places.

Well, everyone who mattered to the Millioni. Tycho imagined they came for the lavish food, for the half-naked jugglers and acrobats, for the right to say they’d attended, or because their absence might be used against them.

To judge from those at the reception a large number had come to gawp at him.

Tycho understood why. How many men in Venice had been shipped south and sold in the slave markets of Cyprus, only to be bought and freed for ten times their price by Lady Desdaio? That he was now a knight only made him more intriguing.
Understanding
didn’t mean he liked it.

The richer of the men around him wore velvet cloaks shaved in intricate patterns and embroidered doublets in the latest style. The young ones wore prominent codpieces, older ones hip-length jackets. Breasts overflowed from their wives’ low-cut gowns, gold circled perfect necks and pulses throbbed like tiny butterflies.

Lord Roderigo stood with the Regent. When Tycho caught Roderigo’s gaze the man scowled and Tycho glared back. He
knew
Roderigo had something to do with that explosion. He didn’t care what Alexa said.

“Sir Tycho…?”

An usher stood next to him, dressed in the gold and scarlet of the Millioni livery. “Lady Giulietta is waiting.”

“For what?”

The young man blinked. “You’re going in together, sir.”

“
This is not my idea…
” Giulietta looked close to tears. The usher might as well have been invisible. And, with a hurried bow, that was how he made himself, retreating through the crowd to leave Lady Giulietta soothing her baby, and glaring at her partner for the evening.

“My aunt says I must sit with you.” Her scowl made Giulietta look younger than her sixteen years. “I owe you my life. Apparently.”

Tycho resisted saying she owed it twice. Of course, the first time the person he’d saved her from was himself. Instead he shrugged to say it was nothing.

Giulietta flushed. “Marco’s idea.”

This translated as
Only a madman would make me sit next to you
. Turning to see what made her scowl deepen, Tycho saw Arno Dolphini, who’d been aboard the
San Marco
with them. “The man’s a fool, my lady.”

“And a liar.”

Tycho wondered what he’d been saying.

Lady Giulietta wore her hair up as befitted a once-married woman, its flaming red contrasting with her widow’s gown, which was cut from black silk that shimmered as she fidgeted. Around
her neck were rubies the size of pigeons’ eggs. Prince Leopold’s ring circled her finger. The only unusual thing was the baby in her arms.

“You’re taking Leo in with you?”

“I’d like to see them stop me.”

In a world where noble women rarely breast-fed, and fathers sent sons away at an early age to learn warfare or trading – as happened to Marco Polo himself – Giulietta’s concern for her child was close to open rebellion.

“Leo looks…”

“Miserable.”

Tycho suspected that was her.

Courtiers read their fortunes in where they sat. Fresh alliances were formed as families realised previously ignored neighbours had become more powerful; old alliances broken as those once favoured found themselves spurned. A feud to last generations began when one noble decided another had his place.

The top table was laid with circles of stale bread and two-pronged silver forks, a Byzantine affectation adopted by the Venetians long before it reached mainland Italy. Tycho only knew this because Lady Desdaio, Atilo’s betrothed, had told him their history.

Did Giulietta realise silver burnt him?

Duchess Alexa did. So did Roderigo and Atilo who once captured him in a silver net… “I can’t use this, my lady.”

“Spear food with your dagger. Scoop gravy with the bread… You were a slave. Why should my aunt expect you to have manners?”

Tycho held his temper.

How was she to know that their sitting together troubled him as much as it obviously troubled her? A heavy stink of smoke might rise from torches on the walls, and the stench of the crowd and the savour of meat roasting in the kitchens might fill the
hall, but all he could smell was the orange water she used as scent, and beneath it the musk of her body, addictive as opium.

He should say something.

Anything would do. He could ask how she’d been, or say something about Leo, apologise for… Tycho picked up his wine glass and put it down again. If he started apologising where would he stop?

Yet what did he have to apologise for?

She’d be dead by her own hand if he hadn’t stopped her in the basilica. He’d never have found her again if Alexa hadn’t sent him to kill Prince Leopold and Tycho ended up saving the prince instead. The creature Tycho became the night of the battle he became to protect her. Did she expect him to apologise for telling the truth?

He
had
been sent to kill her Aunt Alexa.

And he’d been sent on her Uncle Alonzo’s orders, or so he’d been told by a Mamluk prince whose life he spared. The boy had no reason to lie and no lie had shown in his eyes.

Tycho went back to pushing his food around the table.

Talk ebbed and flowed around him. Most was boring, several conversations close to outright rude, a few intended to be private. It was one of these that hooked his interest. Largely because Giulietta had turned away to calm Leo, and Tycho refused to let himself look to see if she fed the child.

So he noticed when the Regent summoned Dr Crow with an imperious click of his fingers. Everyone noticed that. Only Tycho had the sharpness of hearing to make out Alonzo’s words to the little alchemist.

“You’re certain the secret’s safe?”

“My lord, we’ve been through this.”

“
Answer my question
.” Alonzo spoke so loudly Lady Giulietta tensed. Dropping his voice, Alonzo added, “You’d better be certain.”

“I stake my life on it, my lord.”

“You’ve done that already.”

A wave dismissed the man, who left, head down and face troubled. Perhaps Tycho only imagined the man glanced at him as he went.

“My lady,” Tycho said.

“I’m going to feed Leo,” she said tightly.

A servant stopped her before she reached the door. He did so politely, with embarrassment and a low bow, his nod towards the Regent showing where the order for her return originated. Glancing towards the exit, she seemed to consider leaving anyway. Although she returned to her place.

“Apparently I can’t leave until the banquet is over.”

Since Prince Alonzo had already used the privies twice he was obviously making a point about Leo. “You fed him at your wedding. Remember Leopold removing the lace shawl to reveal…?”

Giulietta flushed.

“Not that,” Tycho said hurriedly.

The flash of breast had been unintentional. Leopold meant to show the scar on Leo’s chest. Proof his adopted son was Leopold’s heir
in all things
. Since Leopold was
krieghund
his son would be, too. A werebeast, tied to the changes of the moon. The child would be dead if Alonzo or Alexa knew.

Turning his chair, Tycho said, “I’ll look away.”

“Make sure you do.”

Saliva flooded Tycho’s mouth as she undid her gown, his dog teeth ached furiously. He could smell sweat and feel heat rise from her flesh. Turning further away he found Duchess Alexa staring.

“My lady,” Tycho said to Giulietta.

“
What?
”

Leo wailed, Tycho caught a glimpse of nipple, people tensed and he lost Giulietta’s attention as she returned the baby to her breast, covering both with Leo’s Maltese shawl. The next time Tycho checked Alexa was talking to Alonzo.

“My lady, when you were abducted…”