The Outcast Blade (26 page)

“May I put my shirt on?”

Probably not what she expected him to say.

Her gaze never left him as he pulled the shirt over his head, tying its ribbons with shaking fingers. All he had left inside were emptiness and truth, so he offered her those. “When Leopold asked me to take you to Atilo’s ship I thought we’d all die. That he was simply banishing you so he could die with dignity, and wouldn’t have to kill you himself.”

“Leopold would never…”

“He asked me to do it.”

“
What?
”

“Leopold couldn’t do it himself. So he begged me to. Lord
Atilo also asked. He wanted me to kill Desdaio and I told him that was his job.” Tycho couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice. “We thought we were going to die.”

“And Desdaio and I would prefer being killed to captured?”

“Believe me,” Tycho said. “You would.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve been captured.” Tycho had come to Venice with no memories, and the ones he’d regained made him grateful most were still missing. He thought about putting on his doublet and didn’t bother. Instead he asked if he might come in.

“Yes,” said Giulietta, standing to one side.

“Thank you.”

“That night, I would have liked a choice.” She took a look at Tycho’s face, and added, “So would Desdaio.” Tycho lifted a wine jug and looked to Giulietta for permission; she seemed surprised he gave the first glass to her.

“I didn’t know,” he said carefully. “Until I began fighting that I could alter the course of battle. I didn’t know I could save you until I did.”

“
You could save me?
”

“Why do you think I did it?”

He was careful not to catch her gaze. Not to think too deeply about what he was saying and what happened that night, what he became. For a second it seemed what he’d said was enough, but doubt re-entered her eyes.

“Tell me how you won the battle.”

“Does it matter?”

He let her slap him. He could have caught her wrist, brushed it contemptuously aside or held it with iron fingers. He let her blow land and in the following silence saw a different kind of doubt behind her eyes. It ebbed as he watched, taking care to make no movement to scare her.

“All right,” he said. “Why does it matter?”

He hoped for an answer he could live with. The longer he
stood there the more trouble Giulietta had framing any answer at all.

“We’re alive,” she said finally.

Tycho waited.

“And Leopold’s not…”

“You feel guilty to be alive?”

She wanted to say that wasn’t it, only he could see in her eyes it was. “You should have saved him,” she said sadly. “You saved everyone else.”

“Thousands died.”

Lady Giulietta almost said those thousands didn’t matter but caught herself. Tycho had long since realised only one life lost in that battle mattered to her, the one for which she held him responsible.

There was the rub.

“You’re right,” Tycho said.

Lady Giulietta’s eyes widened. Fury rose inside her so fast its edges flared purple in a halo. Tycho knew only he could see it.

“I could have saved him. But I didn’t know that.”

“You thought you were going to die?”

He nodded.

“So what changed?”

“I did,” said Tycho, forcing out the words.

The Venetians had a word for the hell he inhabited: limbo.

It was as if nothing existed beyond Ca’ Friedland’s walls; its foundations were built above a void, the sky over it was empty. The city was something he created. It had cracks because he did, if he could only find one he could slip through to hide on the other side. There was probably a word for that feeling too. “I made a deal.”

“Who with?”

“The deal was simple.”

“Victory…?

“You lived.”

“In exchange for what?”

“My soul,” he said, watching Giulietta cross herself. He was about
to say he wasn’t even sure he had one. Only she had tears in her eyes and a rare softness smoothed the harshness in her thin face.

“You offered your soul for me?”

“It was always yours.”

Tears magnified her pale blue eyes until he thought he would vanish into them. “
Tycho…
”

“From the night you knelt before the stone mother.”

She smiled at his name for the Virgin, and blushed to recall their meeting. Tycho saw her embarrassment and realised this was the first time in months he’d seen her unveiled. When she held out her hand he thought she was taking him to bed.

He was wrong.

“This is older than the Wolf Brothers.”

As Lady Giulietta raised the long lid, her fingers brushed a gold lock plate decorated with a naked man holding a pelt of fur. Inside was a simpler box and no gold decorated this one. The hinges were brass, however. The walnut sides lovingly polished.

“Lift it out.”

Tycho was surprised by its weight.

He could swear he felt the box shiver. A shutter banged in the hall above, and wind whistled around a rusting trap door overhead. Trying to remember if the wind had been there before, Tycho realised he couldn’t. Maybe it had.

Inside the box was a sword.

“The
WolfeSelle
,” Giulietta said. “I shouldn’t even know its name.”

“May I…?”

She nodded.

He took the handle and this time the shiver was unmistakable. The sword roiled under his fingers as if alive. A high note broke the air, way beyond Giulietta’s hearing. Inside his body something answered. Dark and primal. Something that gloated in being the monster Rabbi Abram had looked for. Tycho could feel a hungry joy and longing he didn’t recognise as any part of himself.

“What’s wrong?”

“Where did Leopold get this?”

“It belongs to the Wolf Brothers as the highest of their objects. Every chief has owned it since…” She named a Hunnish prince he’d never heard of. Tycho only knowing what
Hunnish
was because she told him.

By then thread-like fingers were reaching for his thoughts. Instinctively he brushed them away and pushed back when they kept reaching. He put the
WolfeSelle
down with a bang.

“This belongs to your son.”

“No.” Lady Giulietta was firm.

“You heard Leopold at the christening. He named Leo his heir in all things. This was Leopold’s. Therefore it belongs to Leo.”

“It belongs to the Wolf Brothers.”

“Then give it back to them.”

“How? I can’t go to them. I can never let them come to me.”

“Because they’d discover Leopold made your son
krieghund
?”

She stared at him in shock. “You know that?” Lady Giulietta shook her head, irritated at her own stupidity. “Obviously you do, given your question. You know what my Uncle Alonzo would do if he discovered…?

Tycho knew exactly what the Regent would do. Tycho didn’t doubt Alexa would have the child killed, too. How could either of them let Leo live? The
krieghund
were Sigismund’s shock troops, Venice’s deadliest enemy.

“No one must know.”

“I promise.”

“Leo is
mine
,” Giulietta said. “Whatever God thinks of what he is. Whatever he thinks of how Leo was conceived. He is
my
child and I won’t have him harmed or taken from me.” Beneath her determination she sounded young and frightened. Young, frightened and very, very stubborn.

This was the girl he loved.

“My lady.” The mayor of Gorizia bustled forward, looking both flustered and puffed up at his chance of impressing his long-absent mistress. “The local girls…” His hopes collapsed as Lady Giulietta stepped from her litter and he saw her black gown and gloves, the widow’s veil covering her face.

Spurring his horse, her escort hurried forward and slid from its saddle, offering Giulietta his arm. After a moment’s hesitation she took it.

“My lady will not be…”

“Roderigo.”

Her escort hesitated.

“Let’s be kind,” Giulietta muttered.

A statement so unlikely from the lips of a Millioni princess she knew he instantly believed she’d loved her German princeling – which she had – and was as grief-stricken as rumour said. Watching him decide this she hid a sour smile.

Her grief was real enough to have brought her to Gorizia, a town on the mainland between Port Monfalcone, where she’d recently landed, and Alta Mofacon, the hill village where she was heading.

Lady Giulietta’s very public display of grief was not so much play-acting as the simple result of letting down her guard. Once she’d decided to mourn Leopold properly the tears came. It had taken less than a week of public weeping, at a meeting with the duke, on her way through the streets, navigating the Canalasso in her gondola for a note from Aunt Alexa to arrive.

On that occasion Lady Giulietta dispensed with her retinue and guards and accepted the palanquin her aunt sent for her. She arrived at the palace at dusk, almost alone, simply dressed and in tears.

The meeting was brief. Mercifully, her uncle had been absent. These days he found her presence as hard to stand as she his.

“You loved Leopold that much?” Aunt Alexa asked.

Lady Giulietta had blinked. “It’s complicated,” she said finally. And her eyes had overflowed and spilt the tears she tried to hold back, her throat tightening as she turned away. It was a long time since Aunt Alexa petted her but strong arms wrapped Giulietta and held her.

Only when the sobbing stopped did Alexa let her go; although first she stroked Giulietta’s hair and kissed her forehead as she used to do when Giulietta was a little girl. “So young,” the duchess said.

“I’m seventeen.”

“That’s what I mean. You think your life is over. It’s barely begun. What do you need?” Absent-mindedly Alexa wiped a tear from Giulietta’s face and carried it on a fingertip beneath her veil to taste.

“There are potions for sadness and ointments for grief. However, I cannot make sadness disappear without deadening some of who you are. And you are too much yourself to like that. So tell me what would make it bearable?”

“I want to go home.”

“You want to return to Ca’ Ducale?” Duchess Alexa sounded surprised. “I’d understood you were happy to get away.”

“No,” Giulietta said. “I want to go
home
.”

Aunt Alexa said nothing. She was good at that.

“Alta Mofacon.”

“You stayed there for three summers as a child.”

“It felt like home,” Giulietta said fiercely. “And don’t tell me I have bigger estates because I know that. I’ve looked at the list. Two cities, three market towns, five ordinary towns, a dozen manors, thirty-six villages, two oak forests…”

The duchess nodded approvingly. The forests were worth as much as all the villages together. Shipyards needed oak, the Mamluks needed wood of any sort, having cut down their own supplies, foundries everywhere needed charcoal, which was expensive to buy and rewarding to sell. Duchess Alexa approved of forests. She approved of forests as much as she approved of silver mines.

“All that,” said Giulietta, “before I include Leopold’s lands or my father’s estates in Carpathia.”

“You’re rich.”

“I’ve always been rich.”

“Well, now you’re richer…” Hesitating on the edge of saying more, Alexa chose not to and Giulietta pretended not to notice. She had Tycho’s words fresh in her head. He’d insisted – again – her aunt was behind her abduction.

Having made Giulietta tea, which was Alexa’s answer to most things, she called a scribe and demanded he write a passport allowing Giulietta to leave. Then she took the paper and Giulietta went in search of Marco, who was on the roof feeding pigeons with scraps of pie. He signed without bothering to read it first.

“Sweet c-cousin…”

Giulietta looked back to see him smiling at her. “Have f-fun,” he said. “Say h-hello to the p-pine trees for m-me.” Having blown her a kiss, he went back to shredding sweetmeats into little piles. Feeding raisins to one pigeon, candied peel to another and barely edible pastry to a third.

“How does he…”

“Know what he does?” Alexa shrugged. “Fools are different. Sometime’s very different. Marco is more different than most.”

Lady Giulietta knew that wasn’t the full answer.

All the same, that was how she found herself in Gorizia, a fortified town at the foot of the Julian Alps on the mainland north-east of Venice. It was half a day’s hard ride above Port Monfalcone, which the Germans called Falconberg and the local people something unpronounceable. Her mother had owned Falconberg, Gorizia and Alta Mofacon and all the land in between. Lady Giulietta owned them now.

“Let the girls dance,” she ordered.

Half were fair, most were big breasted and red-cheeked. What their dance lacked in skill it supplied in enthusiasm. Hating herself for her own stuck-upness, Giulietta made herself clap when the dancing was done.

This meant they wanted to do it again.

“Very gracious, my lady.” Lord Roderigo took it for granted she wouldn’t want to see a third performance. In this he was right. She also didn’t want him accompanying her to Alta Mofacon.

“This is where we part.”

“My lady, my orders…”

“Are irrelevant. We’re on my land now.”

She was correct and he knew it. Lady Giulietta held the county in her own right. The laws were her laws not those of the watery city they’d left behind.

“Roderigo,” she said, sweetening the pill. “Look at them. I grew up here. These are my people. It’s half a day’s ride through my own fields. What can happen?”

Scowling, the Dogana captain let his gaze rake over her litter, the three huge-wheeled ox carts loaded with her goods, and the two dozen local guards who accompanied her. Uncle Alonzo would have a spy among them. Aunt Alexa, too. If Cousin Marco hadn’t been an idiot he’d also have had one.

“Will you send a man, my lady, when you’ve arrived?”

“And you’ll wait here?”

“If that’s acceptable.”