The Outcast Blade (12 page)

“She’s in the street.”

“God’s name. Why?”

“The Hebrew girl who came to your door…”

Struggling into his pair of hose, Tycho grabbed a linen shirt and slid his arms into a black velvet doublet that changed to near invisible as shadows caught it. The garment was cut short and stopped at his hips. Like most young Venetians, Tycho wore his codpiece padded in the latest style.

“What about her?”

“She tried to send Lady Desdaio away. Said you’d turned into a monk and stopped bedding pretty little virgins. She should try elsewhere. I don’t think Lady Desdaio was…”

No, Tycho didn’t think she’d be happy about that either.

He’d grown up in a world where his drunken owner rutted slaves where he found them. Desdaio’s upbringing was more careful. Buckling his dagger to his hip, Tycho slid on a ruby ring he’d won gaming and opened the door. Pietro followed him down to the land door and they found Desdaio outside.

“I wondered if you were all right? People are saying…”

That she was worried enough about the wellbeing of an ex-slave to cross the city at night to ask about it was so absurd it had to
be true. What other reason could she have for standing alone in front of his doorway?

“
Desdaio…
”

Her chin came up defiantly.

Tycho sighed. “You’d better come in.”

Lady Desdaio visited again the following week, accompanied by Pietro and unannounced, as before. She brought a wicker basket of fresh figs, saying Tycho looked pale, and a manual of warfare from Atilo’s library, which he read in a single day, decided was mostly rubbish and put it by the door for her to take away on her next visit. It seeming likely there would be a next visit.

The daughter of Venice’s richest man and Tycho’s Jewish maid quickly established a friendship based on the absurdity of their first meeting. Only Desdaio could turn something like that into a fond memory.

She brought Tycho a change of clothes the week after, plus a pair of new kidskin boots she said he’d forgotten he owned, and cold chicken for the winged lizard that refused to leave his house.

“It watches you.”

“Lost from a Mongol boat probably. Elizavet feeds it. It stays.”

Desdaio shook her head. “Look at its eyes.”

Tycho did and found himself looking away. The winged lizard followed him even more closely that night, sleeping on his bolster, so Tycho woke to the next night’s darkness with the creature a finger’s breadth from his face.

It was a day or two later that he realised Desdaio’s visits always coincided with meetings of the Ten. The Council of Ten held Venice in its liver-spotted hands. Old men like Atilo were swift to send young men to their deaths, young women, too. Tycho wondered if Lady Desdaio knew the risks she was taking.

On her fourth visit, when he suggested using the
altana
as the night was hot and the wind over the roof would cool them, she looked surprised. “The moon no longer troubles you?”

“A new moon tonight, my lady.”

“But the moon no longer troubles you when full?”

She was remembering another night, when the faintest sliver of a full moon seen over her shoulder had driven him half mad. So he lied. “That’s changed, my lady.”

“What changed it?”

“Getting older, I suppose.”

Desdaio liked that answer. She nodded with the superiority of someone aged twenty-four talking to someone not yet twenty. Age had not cured Tycho’s hunger, of course. The beggar girl’s blood had.

“What are you thinking?”

“How strange Venice is.”

She smiled sadly. “Of course you are.”

Five years older than him, Desdaio read fluently, spoke three languages and had a figure to make men turn so fast they walked into walls. She was also – as people never tired of pointing out – the richest heiress in Venice and once suggested as a suitable wife for Marco IV. That was why it had been such a shock when she moved herself into the house of the late duke’s Moor…

It was Atilo she wanted to talk about.

Tycho knew that the moment she began to talk about him instead. Asking where he gambled, if he still kept mistresses. Telling him his sudden disappearance from society had only made him appear more mysterious.

“I’ve reformed.”

“So I’ve heard,” she said tartly. “You’ve stopped collecting Venetian virgins. I suppose that makes me safer.”

“
Desdaio…
”

Seeing the pain in her eyes, Tycho folded his fingers into hers. She turned away on the edge of pulling her hand free.

“What’s troubling you?” he asked.

“Giulietta.”

“What about her?” Maybe he sounded sharper than he intended, because she removed her hand and her face shut down. “Sorry,” Tycho said.

“You’ve heard about Sigismund’s envoy?”

“Elizavet said a German noble arrived this morning with five knights and ten servants, demanding half the Fontego dei Tedeschi be cleared for his personal use. What about him?”

“I should be happy for her. Instead…”

Tycho felt shocked. He’d once heard Desdaio described as sugar with added honey. It was hard to imagine what made her scowl so fiercely. “What’s he got to do with Giulietta?”

“Sigismund is suggesting a marriage.”

Tycho put down his glass.

“I’m jealous… All right?” Desdaio said. “I’ve said it. I’m jealous. She’s been married once and now she’s going to be married again. Why should she be the next? I’ve been engaged to Atilo for over a year.”

“She’s agreed?”

Desdaio’s shrug said that was irrelevant.

To Tycho whether or not Giulietta had said yes was the only thing that mattered, but even upset he knew he couldn’t say that to Desdaio, so he asked a different question. “You’ve quarrelled with Atilo?”

Desdaio nodded mutely.

Risking a sideways glance, Tycho noticed her figure was a little fuller, her skin a little less glowing, her chestnut hair, which she famously refused to rinse with urine and potash to turn Venetian-red,
less striking than he remembered. She was young, beautiful and rich. Just not as young or as beautiful as she once was.

“Like what you see?” she demanded.

“Desdaio…”

She scowled. “They say the number of virgins in Venice halved in a month. That maidenheads fell like petals.”

“They lie.”

Desdaio glared at him. “You didn’t want mine?”

“My lady, you don’t mean this.”

“Why not?” Desdaio said furiously. “He won’t bed me.”

“
You asked?
” Tycho tried to imagine Atilo’s appalled reaction.

“I asked when we would marry and he said when the time was right. So I said I would go to his bed if that was what he wanted; that we were betrothed and could swear an oath that we would marry and so be free to… All my friends are married, and half have children. And now Giulietta is going to be married
again
.”

As she leant forward, the neck of her gown fell outwards, revealing the upper swell of her breasts and the valley between. He smelt sweat from her walk through Dorsoduro, what she’d eaten for supper, the sudden scent of longing as her breast shifted beneath her silk gown and her nipple brushed his wrist.

She kissed him hard, her mouth opening and her lips softening. And then she was pushing him away to sit back, too appalled at herself to protest.

That was how Lady Giulietta found them a few seconds later.

Sitting on a bench on Tycho’s wooden roof platform, under the starlit bowl of a moonless sky, leant back from each other in shocked silence.

“
My lord
,” Pietro said loudly.

Giulietta lifted the candle she carried and glared into their faces, until Tycho stood to snuff the wick with his fingers.

“We’re trying to watch the stars,” he said.

“
She’s here to watch stars?
”

“Why do you think I’m here?” Desdaio snapped.

Lady Giulietta glared. That wasn’t the way one addressed a Millioni princess. “How would I know? All I know is Tycho’s maid didn’t want to let me in unannounced. And your boy didn’t want to bring me up here.”

“Maybe you should have listened.”

Stepping between them, Tycho touched Pietro on the shoulder to tell him to stop staring. “Take Lady Desdaio home and use my gondola. Leave it in one of the side canals and I’ll have someone collect it tomorrow.”

“I can walk.”

“You’d be safer by gondola.”

“Not to mention,” said Giulietta, “it being more fitting than walking the streets at night without a proper escort. Assuming you still care about such things.”

“Says the woman who…”

“Pietro,” Tycho said tightly.

The boy almost herded Desdaio towards the
altana
’s ladder. At the hatch, Desdaio stopped, turned and hesitated.

“We’ll talk later,” Tycho promised.

Nodding, Desdaio left without curtsying to Lady Giulietta or even acknowledging she was there. A clatter of feet in a corridor below, steps on the piano nobile stairs, Elizavet’s voice, the rattle of a hall door opening, silence, then sobs…

“Do you have to be such a bitch?”

“
What did you say?
”

“You heard me…” He stared at where the moon should be, and heard a rustle of silk. “Don’t,” he said, “because I will slap back.”

“Real noblemen don’t hit women.”

“I’m not a real nobleman.”

“The king I should have married made you a knight. My
husband stood by you in battle. Marco gave you his friendship. My aunt gave you this house…” She stared at him, her eyes bright and her hands on her hips, and then the fight went out of her like wind from the sails of fishing boat. “What have I done to deserve this?” Her bottom lip was trembling.

Tycho realised she meant it.

“I saved your life,” he said almost gently. “And you threw me out of your house and told me not to come back. You said I took advantage of you… That you never wanted to see me again.”

“So you turned to Desdaio instead?”

“She’s a friend and lonely. That’s the only reason she was here.”

“Everyone but Atilo knows about this
friendship
. What do you think people say about her? What do you think they say about you?” The tremble was obvious now. Lady Giulietta was fighting tears and losing.

“Desdaio loves only Atilo.”

“You’re an idiot. You must realise she loves you too…”

“She thinks I’m a demon.”

Giulietta shut her mouth, swallowing a question, although her gaze sharpened, and Tycho knew she was waiting for him to explain.

“I told her about my childhood once.”

“About which I know nothing.”

“I spent seven years chained to a gate as a dog. I slept in ditches. A noble kicked me in the guts for being in his way and saved my life by pissing on me. I was freezing to death and his anger made me hide in a stable.”

Tycho stared across the rooftops and wondered how to describe the Skaelingar’s nightmare wars of attrition now Bjornvin seemed so far away. The Skaelingar had been winning long before he was born.

“Our enemy fought naked with axes, bows and knives. Their skins bright red and oily in the night. They gutted us, cut breasts
from our women, skewered babies on spits. Their leader had horns…”

Tycho recognised the look on Lady Giulietta’s face.

It had been on Desdaio’s face the night he told her about Bjornvin. He expected Giulietta to fire questions at him or warn him to keep this secret. Instead, she crossed herself, and left without looking back.

Tycho let her go.

Only later did he realise he didn’t know why she was there.

The suggestion Sir Tycho Bell’ Angelo Scuro present himself by noon at the Ca’ Ducale for a meeting with Prince Alonzo wasn’t exactly an order, nor was it a simple request. The guards in the alley below were proof of that

“The black doublet.”

Elizavet took the garment from a wooden box, her thumbs brushing the garment’s strange surface.

“Oiled silk made by Dr Crow.”

At Tycho’s mention of the alchemist, the girl scowled.

“And the black hose, the matching gloves and the boots.”

He stripped easily, oblivious to Elizavet’s blushes, and dressed slowly, almost as if conducting a ritual. The shirt first, followed by black hose, laced codpiece and padded doublet. His expression in the glass was unreadable, his gaze turned inwards as he wrestled with what the summons could mean. A visit from Lady Giulietta followed by a summons from her uncle. Both in their way his self-declared enemies. And Alexa had not been in touch since he admitted to Giulietta that she’d asked him to watch out for her.

That had been well over a month ago.

By the time Tycho had finished belting on his daggers and
was turning for the door his face was stripped of emotion and his eyes cool. He looked what he was. A man trained in the use of weapons. No one would see the beast inside. Or the slave boy he’d been before that.

“Go tell the lieutenant I’m almost ready.”

Elizavet did as ordered.

The soft-faced
cittadino
’s son who’d knocked imperiously an hour earlier had refused to believe Sir Tycho was not yet awake or out of bed, his temper worsening when told Tycho must prepare to meet the Regent.

Tycho had not faced the sun for months, and though he knew Dr Crow’s spectacles and what remained of the alchemist’s unguents would protect him, he still feared daylight for all he missed it.

Rubbing the dregs of the ointment into his face, Tycho slid smoked-glass spectacles on to his nose, and smoothed his wolf-grey braids and hid them under a wide-brimmed hat. As he walked downstairs, past closed shutters and curtained windows, he let his eyes adjust to the gloom.

He wanted to be ready for the shock of the sunlight beyond.

“Oh, so you’re finally…” Having taken a second look, the lieutenant decided the rumours barely did Sir Tycho’s strangeness justice and kept the rest of that sentence to himself. “Sir… You need to leave your daggers here.”

“Alonzo wants me?”

The correct address was
Prince Alonzo
. The
cittadino
’s son wondered that a new-made knight would ignore such niceties. He wondered so obviously Tycho almost smiled.