The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

38





And on the other side of the Adriatic Sea, in a strange fort built into the head of a high valley, the infant they argued about slept in a stronghold doorway, wrapped in rancid furs, while the man neither Giulietta nor Marco mentioned hacked the heads from dead archers and spiked them on spears arranged in a row. Their bodies he dragged through the stronghold and up stone steps to leave at the mouth of a cave – in case those who lived inside could use them. The weather was so cold that neither the bodies nor their glassy-eyed heads rotted.

Roderigo’s corpse he impaled for his part on the night Tycho was captured in a silver net on Duchess Alexa’s orders. Under the tallow light of a cruel moon, he put Roderigo right in the middle of the line he’d arranged as a warning to anyone foolish enough to approach the walls. And as he wrestled the spear upright, and dropped its end into the hole he’d stabbed and twisted into frozen earth, he considered what the creature in the cave had said. It could all be lies, of course. Even that strange almost-memory of angels fighting and falling could be a lie. Perhaps he simply wanted it to be untrue . . .

Although those in the cave left him untouched, he knew they watched, unless that was the elder goddess herself. Tycho suspected she was too old and too powerful to bother with lesser immortals any more.

Leo was walking now.

That was new. At least, he thought it was. He hadn’t paid the infant much attention except as an extension of Giulietta but he was pretty certain the walking was new and hoped she’d be pleased. He knew she would pass this way soon. He’d told her where he was and that he had Leo. If she didn’t come for him she’d come for the child. He was as certain of this as he was that the ice would soon thaw. So he slept his days in the armoury, which was windowless and had a door it was easy to bar, and woke each dusk to find the child sitting by him, looking thoughtful or puzzled, or whatever that strange Millioni expression was meant to be. He fed the infant on scraps collected from the satchels of the wild archers and wondered endlessly whether the goat-heeled creature had lied.

“What do you think?”

Leo didn’t care. Maybe he thought they should wait there for his mother.

“Do you?” Tycho asked. The child burped and Tycho decided that was probably a stay here vote. He could almost hear Giulietta like a single note at the edge of his mind. Her name was written each night across the sky in stars. He had no doubt she was coming. He hardly dared imagine how she’d managed that. “She’ll be here soon.” Something he’d been promising for days.

How would they greet each other? Would she see the guilt in his eyes?

Tycho knew he was behaving like a child and felt shamed without knowing why. Inside his head was a cold darkness that stared back implacably, daring him to venture deeper. He’d thought everyone had that. Pulling a whetstone from his pocket, he drew his sword and dragged the stone along its edge, grinding away the jagged notches put there by his fight with Roderigo. As he did, he tried to still the fears in his head and realised that no whetstone existed to smooth out the notches in his soul . . .

So, you think you have one after all?

A soul? Maybe not, but Giulietta thought he did. He’d arrived in Venice without memories, only to regain fragments when near drowning washed his amnesia away, and Rosalyn, the ragged girl who pulled him from the canal, had been certain it was more than near drowning. He’d been dead when she spotted him floating by the stone steps at Rialto and dragged him ashore. How many times could one person die and still keep a soul?

“All right, all right,” Tycho said.

Leo was grizzling again. Keeping the toddler shit free and fed was a full-time occupation. The child had re-embraced life with a fierce hunger, lungs of steel and the ability to slime food scraps at both ends.

Leo grinned as Tycho picked him up.

“Yeah,” Tycho said. “Your father was a monster, too.” Pulling a chunk of stale bread from his pocket, Tycho tore off a mouthful, bit into an even harder sliver of ewe’s cheese and began to chew. The pulp he spat into his hand he gave the child, who ate it greedily. “I hope you appreciate it,” he said.

The child with Giulietta’s eyes looked up at him.

Tycho doubted he would forget Giulietta. Any more than he’d forget Afrior, the girl who died at the gates of Bjornvin and who he’d thought his sister, with all the bloody complication that caused. First Afrior, now this . . . With a shock, Tycho realised letting Leo go would be almost as hard as parting with Giulietta, and that would be unbearable. Heartbreaking, if he believed for a moment he had any heart left to break.

“Shit,” he said. “You probably won’t even realise I’m gone.”

Or was here at all. That was the brutal bit. To sacrifice and not be remembered, walk away and not be able to say why. Because how could Tycho say what he’d need to say to explain why this was happening . . .

Things change.

Well, he could hardly deny that. And some things, he thought bitterly, remain the same. Dawn was coming and Giulietta so close he could taste her on the last of the night wind. When daylight came he would hide. As he would have to hide every day between now and eternity if the creature from the cave told the truth. Time enough to get rich and powerful, if he could be bothered. For a fleeting moment, he fantasised about being the next Tamburlaine, and building an empire across time as well as distance. An immortal emperor of a never-dying empire . . . An endless succession of empresses beautiful enough to make him forget Giulietta. She’d become that young Italian woman with the red hair whose name he couldn’t remember, except that he’d always remember it. He knew himself too well.

After he carried Leo into the fort and up the guard steps to the battlements, the cold winds sweeping up the valley blew his fantasies away. He might change his name and build another life but he had no wish to rule for the sake of it. If he really had all of time as his playground he’d find better things to do with it. But that could come later; first he needed to do the impossible . . . Return Leo and lie to the woman he loved.

“You keep what you’ve seen to yourself,” he told the infant.

Leo grinned.

The army marched between the white slopes of the valley and the ground under their feet was so hard it might have been stone. Weeks of freezing weather had turned the snow solid, while furious winds along the valley floor had scoured away any drifting snow that might have softened it.

They took the simplest route and kept to the lowest valleys and would have taken another two days to reach the fort had Tycho not brought Leo to meet them. There were more men than Tycho expected. Although he was not to know – and only discovered later – that Marco had used a quarter of those who accompanied him to secure the port and garrison towns along the way, having already sent half his men to the capital with orders to take it peacefully if possible, bloodily if not. The old Montenegrin aristocracy had used the feud between Marco and Alonzo to declare their own independence. Marco needed to secure the capital for Venice. He intended to besiege Alonzo’s headquarters himself.

So the men marched through wisps of drifting snow, heads down, one foot placed stolidly in front of the other, becoming simply an army, that great unthinking creature on the move. The creature had walked in daylight, slept fitfully, moved again under the light of a tallow moon – and would soon sleep again, before moving on. In years to come armies would grow but for now ten thousand was large and fifteen thousand immense. And though Marco had brought somewhere between these numbers, he’d divided his forces so often that fifteen hundred marched unknowing towards where Tycho waited.

Well, most marched: two hundred knights rode at the column’s head and a dozen outriders protected each flank. It was one of the outriders who noticed Tycho framed against the dawn. He shouted a warning that had his companions falling into battle order. Tycho hated them for ending this part of his life.

The early sun flared like flame on his shoulders.

He might as well have stood with his back to the mouth of hell. His clothes felt on fire, but his jacket had nothing to fear. His flesh was the only thing likely to burn. But he had chosen a spot where they would see him and see him they had. Stepping now into shadow, Tycho blew out his breath in gratitude. Leo looked untroubled. Down in the valley, however, the column scrabbled like a kicked-over ants’ nest. At an order, a dozen archers broke from the column and strung their bows, notching arrows and judging distances as they watched him descend.

“I have Prince Leo,” Tycho shouted.

He lifted the giggling child high above his head and relied on the last of the moon and the first of the sun to let them see the prince was happy and unharmed. One of the archers recognised Tycho’s wolf-grey braids and a roar of outrage went up. Outlaw, kill him and bastard. Still they hesitated, watching as he stalked towards them. Tycho was wanted for Alexa’s murder and could hardly claim he hadn’t killed her. But Prince Leo clung to him and a safe shot was impossible.

“Suppose I should thank you,” Tycho muttered.

Leo burbled.

“H-h-hold . . .” The order came from the column’s front where a knight in the purple, white and gold of Venice whirled his mount and cantered towards the archers, flanked by a knight in gilded armour and another in white plate. “L-let the g-grievous angel approach.”

“I have Leo, your highness.”

Tycho lifted the princeling and the knight in white plate spurred his mount, causing the man in gilded armour to shout a warning. Scree shifted and the white-armoured rider dragged at his horse’s head to stop it sliding on the slope.

“Give him to me . . .”

It couldn’t be, and yet Tycho knew it was.

Lady Giulietta sat armoured and astride a panting warhorse, reins folded into one hand, her other hand reaching towards her son. Tycho wondered sadly why he’d expected anything else. He’d been proud of her from the moment they met. Her fierce intelligence, the quiet fury with which she met life full-on. It was only seeing her now that made him realise how utterly desperate she must have been the night she knelt before the stone mother and tried to take her own life.

The knight in gilded armour spurred his mount forward and Lady Giulietta turned to smile . . . Instantly, Tycho wanted to kill him. He wanted to pull his guts through a slit in his stomach. The wave of jealousy shocked him. “We haven’t really met,” the knight said. The young man’s expression was guarded.

Swallowing his fury, Tycho recognised Frederick, Leopold’s brother. In Frederick, Tycho saw echoes of Leopold, who’d begun as Tycho’s enemy and ended as his friend. This man, however, was no friend.

“Your highness . . .”

“Lord Tycho.”

“Hello, angel.” Duke Marco grinned.

Tycho bowed. “Your mother . . .”

“I k-know,” said Marco. “Killed by B-Byzantine assassins. Hideous. I’m so sorry you were blamed unjustly.” He edged his mount forward, putting himself between Tycho and the others, and them between him and the archers. “Well,” he said quietly. “I can h-hardly say you’re the head of m-my Assassini and my m-mother ordered her own d-death, can I . . .? Now, put J-Julie out of her m-misery.”

Stepping round Marco’s horse, Tycho lifted the child. His fingers touched the metal at her gauntlet and he missed the spark that usually flared between them. “My lady . . . Your son.”

“T-thank him,” Marco said. “He g-got your son back.”

Lady Giulietta dipped her head.

Then she was hugging Leo, her steel-clad arms tight around the child and her face pushed to his and she was sobbing as if her heart was broken, although Tycho knew it was mended.

“Thank you,” she said. Leopold nodded and Tycho’s hackles rose.

Who was he to join in Lady Giulietta’s thanks?

“R-ride with me,” Marco ordered.

“Your highness, I have no mount.”

The duke clapped his hands and a bearded groom cantered forward with one of Marco’s spare mounts. The animal was already saddled.

“I’m bad at riding, highness.”

“You’re afraid?”

“Only of appearing a fool in front of Giulietta.”

Marco smiled sympathetically. “I”m rubbish at r-riding,” he confided. “It’s best to let the animal do all the w-work and simply p-pretend you know what you’re d-doing without doing anything. Much like being a prince . . . Come, we’ll both p-pretend we know what we’re d-doing. D-don”t worry,” he added. “I know we need to g-get you under cover before the sun r-rises.”