The Outcast Blade (27 page)

Lady Giulietta hid her smile. It was better than she expected. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sure the mayor will make you comfortable while you wait.”

At her side the mayor nodded.

Lord Roderigo was having trouble adjusting to this new version of her. Giulietta liked that. She liked being here in her hill town, on the way to her favourite place in the world; but she wasn’t stupid, she knew half her happiness came from having cried herself out.

What began as a ruse took over until she thought her tears would never stop. Tears for Leopold, tears for her son and what his future held, tears for her own childhood’s unhappiness. Even, though it filled her with guilt to remember it, tears at how badly she’d treated her lady-in-waiting, and tears for Tycho…

She’d cried so much her eyes were empty and her milk salty with tears.

It was whispered she’d said goodbye to her dead husband in a frenzy of grief more suited to the death of a barbarian chief.

“Leo…”

“Is sleeping, my lady.”

Lady Eleanor had appeared at her side at the exact moment Giulietta wanted to ask her a question.

“The wet nurse is with her?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“And he’s…”

“More interested in stewed fruit.” Lady Eleanor grinned and stared around her, taking in a fortified tower, built by one of the Hunnish kings, and the hills rising to mountains beyond. “Strong as an ox, that child.”

Lady Giulietta smiled.

“You,” she said.

The man she picked looked surprised. He was small, untidy and barely noticeable to someone like her. Giulietta imagined that helped in his line of work.

“You’re to take this to Lord Roderigo.”

He took her letter reluctantly.

She’d spent half the afternoon’s journey to Alta Mofacon deciding which two of the three most anonymous guards was Alonzo’s spy and which her aunt’s.

“I ride poorly, my lady.”

“You won’t be riding. It’s mostly downhill, which will help with walking. You can walk back or wait for a carter to come this way.”

She’d left her letter poorly sealed to make it easier to read, although if he were any kind of spy at all he’d be able to melt and refix the wax without it showing.

The man bowed low.

That just left Aunt Alexa’s spy.

“Take those two soldiers,” Giulietta told her sergeant. “And set up a watch post there.” She pointed at a broke-backed mountain that rose to a peak on its right, with a gap like a missing tooth near the top. Below falls of grit and gravel was a goat path that climbed through summer scrub. It would take half an hour to navigate, maybe more; in half an hour it would be nightfall.

“Tell the men to find wood, build a beacon and light it if they see movement on the plains below. You return but they remain.”

She was her own captain.

This had been explained to her guards. They answered to their sergeant, who answered to her. She expected them to obey without hesitation.

Giulietta smiled. That took care of Alexa’s spy, and if the two her sergeant was taking were innocent, then no problem; her other choice was the sergeant himself. “Perhaps I should stay,” he said.

“No,” Giulietta said.

She watched the three begin their trek towards the scree, and turned to check how Alonzo’s spy was doing on his return to the coast. Any minute now he’d be hidden in an orange grove. The trees that hid him from her would hide her from him.

“Get my carts into the courtyard.”

The man she addressed grabbed an ox collar and began tugging the reluctant beast into action. With a heavy sigh it pulled the first of the carts under an arch and into an empty square. Although the manor yard would be a nightmare come winter, recent sun had baked spring mud to the hardness of stale bread. As the lead oxen raised its tail to splash shit into the dirt, Giulietta smiled; not even minding how close the beast came to soiling her dress.

This was home.

For all Aunt Alexa’s protest that she’d only spent three summers here, this was home because this was where her mother had been happiest, alone on her own little estate. “I’ll take the upper room in that corner.”

“My lady…” One look at her stubborn face and the steward was ordering servants to move furniture from the room they’d prepared to the one she wanted.

“You’ll sleep next door,” she told Eleanor. “In my room.”

Her lady-in-waiting looked puzzled.

“When I was small.”

“And Leo, my lady?”

“Put his wet nurse on the other side.”

The concerns of her immediate family dealt with, Lady Giulietta turned her attention to wider matters. Within ten minutes her possessions were unloaded, she’d refused a formal supper and demanded fresh bread, cheese and fruit be brought to her room. “But first,” she said, “gather everyone in the hall. I want to address them.”

The canvas covering the third cart was so rotten that Tycho’s blade cut through it like wind through smoke. The courtyard was dark – which he expected – and as deserted as Lady Giulietta had promised it would be.

Her manor had heavy walls of a yellowy stone that was new to him, red pantiles on the roof and window frames carved from sandstone. Tycho swallowed the details of this place she loved so much in a single glance. The manor house was less grand than he expected, but solid. The walls looking as if they’d been standing for five hundred years.

Around him light bled from half a dozen windows, but the stars still showed higher and clearer in the sky than in Venice. So this was where the girl he loved felt so at home? In a squat manor little better than a farmhouse, with oxen lowing in the distance, swifts skimming the roofs and the sound of a fiddle coming from a nearby tavern. Wood smoke, wild herbs and manure scented the air.

My house is your house. You may enter anywhere
.

The words she’d whispered as she passed the cart on her way inside to talk to those who had looked after her lands in the eleven years she’d been away. The people he’d heard greet her with respect, and a nervous fondness that came from remembering her as a child.

Tycho held out his hand to Rosalyn.

She climbed from the ox cart in clothes so ragged they must have come from charity or a corpse. If the first, the Brothers of the Poor were well rid, because Tycho could see lice crawling through frayed seams. If the second, it had been a rich corpse. The original dress was silk dyed to a flat black.

“Where did you get that?”

“Stole it.”

He considered asking where but didn’t.

Kicking her feet in the dirt, Rosalyn looked sullenly around her. “This is where she wants to live?” Rosalyn’s nose wrinkled
as if ox dung was worse than the sulphur of Venice’s foundries or the urine of its tanners’ pits. She sniffed again, this time in disgust.

“You will behave.”

Rosalyn gave a little curtsy.

“Lady Giulietta has just saved us.”

The girl was obviously about to say she didn’t need saving but shut her mouth instead. Reaching up, she combed fingers through her filthy hair and straightened the rancid dress. “Where do we sleep?”

“In the cellars.”

She stepped closer and stared up at him, the amber flecks in her eyes glittering in the starlight until staring at them was like looking at the night sky itself. Tycho stepped back slightly and her face hardened.

“Do we sleep together?”

He was too slow to understand her question.

She stepped back, tugging the dress tight against her, so he could see what she was offering. And he saw a scrawny child, with thin hips and slight breasts and filthy hair. There was a fineness to her thin face he didn’t remember, and a wildness behind her eyes from a life that had been brutal long before she died the way she did.

“Well?” Rosalyn said fiercely.

He knew she’d had pimps and protectors, what passed for a lover and her time on the night streets had been as grim as anything Bjornvin could offer, just in a different way. He understood she offered more than her body.

“Rosalyn…”

The fierceness went out of her eyes as she looked away, staring into the distance at something he imagined she didn’t see. Her face when she looked back was stripped of emotion and her voice flat. “You love your princess.” It was part statement, part question; but mostly she was daring him to deny it.

“From the moment I saw her.”

“Of course you did.” Rosalyn stared at him for a second, then shrugged to dismiss the conversation. “I’m hungry. Where can I feed?”

Tycho sighed with relief. “Nowhere within twenty minutes. Twenty minutes your speed. Be back before dawn.”

“And you’re sure Pietro…?”

“As I said. He’s safe at Ca’ Friedland.”

That she could smile at this touched Tycho.

He imagined there were times she forgot her small brother altogether. There had certainly been times he forgot everyone outside his own darkness. Her foul temper had mostly faded, her humour improved. In the week they’d hidden at Ca’ Friedland she’d found many bits of herself that were human.

“Go,” he told her. “Feed.”

“Yes, master.”

Tycho knew he was being mocked.

This is what I wanted…

The bed was as she remembered it. A huge oak frame with a straw-stuffed mattress at the bottom, a wool-stuffed mattress above, and over the top of those her feather bed stuffed with the finest goose down.

A bolster was there to support her head.

Carved posts rose from the corners of her mother’s bed, not quite as huge as Giulietta recalled, but still big enough to have needed a fat oak branch for each. Thick red curtains hung on all four sides, drawn back and tied with velvet rope. In winter they would keep her warm but it was high summer and she wanted to be able to see the sky. Her sky, since it was over her land.

In her head, Giulietta could see her mother on the bed, nursing a headache but still trying to smile at the small girl in her doorway. Zoë di Millioni had been rich enough to afford a three-mattress bed in each of her houses. Most nobles travelled with their beds; her mother had owned half a dozen.

Tonight I will sleep
.

For the first time in weeks she would close her eyes to
the darkness and wake to the day without dreams or waking ridiculously early. No falling out of tall trees and jerking herself awake. No being chased by faceless assassins. No Leo to feed. The bed was hers and her body was hers.

She meant it. Tonight she would sleep.

“I’ll wash myself,” she told Lady Eleanor.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Giulietta waved her towards the door. “See you in the morning.” She kissed her lady-in-waiting on the cheek, much to Eleanor’s surprise, and smiled at the click of the door closing.

Tycho was out there somewhere.

He would be roaming Mofacon’s hills. Watching the crescent moon in that unsettling way of his, letting the wind blow through his hair; she liked the idea of that. And the wild girl she’d hidden for him?

Doing the same.

Giulietta folded her clothes neatly, washed her hands and face, and then under her arms using the cloth laid out. Then she knelt, as she’d knelt every night she could remember, and prayed to the
stone mother
.

Leopold had laughed at her for praying.

Asked who she thought was out there in the darkness to hear. It was as close as they’d come to an outright argument. In the end, Leopold stepped back from the breach, saying women often found comfort in religion. And though the argument that statement produced was furious it was not fatal.

All done, and Leopold’s memory called up for once without tears, Giulietta bolted her own door, slid under her white sheet and slept like a child.

Wiping her mouth, Rosalyn looked at the old priest’s body. His life had been long, hard and happy. She wondered how that was possible. Blue skies, long summers, cold winters, occasional hunger and occasional plenty.

In his memories she tasted life as she’d not known it could be lived. For the moment, minute by minute, contentedly. She was shocked to discover she was crying. Even more shocked to realise she resented being made to feel more human now than she had ever felt when properly alive…

Was this what Tycho felt?

Was this why he fought so hard to deny himself food?

Because the vulnerability other people’s memories brought wore his anger away? Rosalyn wondered if she should feel sorry for the life taken and decided there was little point. The man had been old, close to dying and wouldn’t have lived another winter anyway. Besides, how could she survive if she wasn’t allowed to feed?

Time to go home…

She reached the edges of the village she’d found in seconds, the harbour at Port Monfalcone a few minutes later and skirted Gorizia, passing the man Lady Giulietta had sent with a message as he was gasping up the final mile to Alta Mofacon.

The man didn’t see her but the person watching him did.

Tycho stood between trees in an apple grove, his hair silver-grey in the moonlight and a strange smile on his lips. Rosalyn had a sudden feeling he knew exactly where she’d been and what she’d been thinking.

“That dress is rancid.”

More an observation than a complaint. At least, that’s how it sounded to her. So she waited to see what else Tycho would say.

“Wash yourself.”

“Master.

“Use sand if you can’t stand water. And stop calling me that.”

“Yes, master.”

She felt his gaze follow her as she stepped off the edge of the road to skid down a slope, gravel and scree dragging at her heels. A second later he followed after her; his descent was neater and
less playful. At the bottom a dry riverbed was lined with grit carried down from the mountains.

“Take off your dress.”

She did as he ordered, wondering if he intended to take her after all.

He would not be her first, obviously enough. But it would be her first with him, and the first time since she… Rosalyn drew a deep breath and knew she needed to learn how to name what had happened.

Instead he took her dress, shaking it so hard and fast it cracked like a whip. Then he slammed it against a rock a couple of times, and climbed the slope to find a culvert that carried water to the terraces below. He rinsed the rag quickly, wringing it dry with a brutality that made stitches pop.