The Outcast Blade (28 page)

“Didn’t the lice offend you?”

What lice?
she wondered, hearing him sigh. She took the dress he threw her, scrabbling into it without really knowing why.

“You fed?”

She nodded.

“Good.” Taking her wrist, he bit deep, his dog teeth descending to cut into her flesh like arrow points. Stepping back he considered the taste.

“Rich,” Tycho said finally.

She guessed he meant rich with the life she’d taken from her kill. Biting into his own wrist, he said, “Now you.”

Grabbing his hand in case he snatched it away, Rosalyn rocked backwards as half a dozen new colours lit the hillside, more colours than she knew existed.
Oh shit
, she thought.
What Tycho gets from feeding is way beyond me
.

Vision that could see for miles, hearing that caught the flutter of a tiny bat overhead, a vixen barking three valleys beyond. As for the scents on the wind, they twisted together like brightly lit threads. For a second she saw the world as Tycho saw it. When she looked up, her eyes were wide.

He obviously wondered if her clumsy curtsy was mockery.

Tycho must know she wouldn’t dare. Turning, Rosalyn ran for the slope leading up to the white walls circling Alta Mofacon.

Her needs were simple: his approval and food. Tycho allowed her the second without telling her how to earn the first. She guessed she’d simply replaced Josh with a man who was kinder, if somewhat more dangerous.

Josh had been her first.

She’d been young, very young. He hadn’t much cared about that. He found her food, found her shelter and, after a while, when she’d learnt to crave his approval, withdrew it. Well, now Josh was dead and she was…?

Not dead
, Rosalyn guessed.

Though she remembered dying. Remembered an abject terror so fierce it froze her, and a blow to her chest and cold steel sliding under her rib, as the night sky faded and Tycho’s face twisted in misery, because he was unable to stop it happening.

Rats scuttled in the grain pits built into Alta Mofacon’s walls. In the little guardhouse, the keeper was locked in an argument with his wife and losing. His beaten tone as he admitted he might have been wrong reminded Rosalyn of someone.

After a second she realised it was her.

A couple in a house beyond also argued despite the night’s lateness. Theirs lacked the other argument’s bitterness and spite. As Rosalyn listened they stopped fighting and started rutting instead.

A change as swift as a shift in the wind.

A wild dog turned towards Rosalyn looking puzzled. A feral cat arched its back. Rosalyn heard a baby whimper, and a girl stifle a cry, though the two were unconnected. The night breeze rustled the smaller branches and feathered grass growing between slabs in a deserted garden, flicked and teased leaves on a tree. The air smelt different, tasted different.

She liked it here.

Scrambling up a wall, Rosalyn stepped over a gap between house and manor wall, felt a tile shift under her toes and slide towards an alley below.

“What was that?”

“What was what?”

She left two nightwatchmen in a discussion going nowhere.

Fixing her fingers and toes into mortarless gaps, she scaled the side of Giulietta’s manor, landed lightly on a ledge and edged towards an open shutter before rolling herself over a waist-high windowsill and landing lightly on her feet in an open passage above the great hall.

The sound of a baby snuffling and a woman snoring came from behind the same door. Sweat soured the air from all those who slept on straw in the hall below.

“You,” someone said.

Rosalyn turned.

A shocked girl watched her, face half hidden by a hand to her mouth.

Shocked by the speed of Rosalyn’s turn, most probably. The girl’s nightgown fell to her knees. Her feet and ankles were surprisingly clean. “What are you doing up here?”

Pretty
, thought Rosalyn, wondering if she meant the dark-skinned girl or the embroidered white nightgown she was wearing.

“Answer my question.”

“Why?”

The girl flushed.

Instantly, Rosalyn could sense blood beneath her skin and feel a tracery of rivers and rivulets bringing life to her body. So young and sweet, so clean. So very unlike everything Rosalyn was.

“Come with me…” The girl held out her hand.

What?
Rosalyn was puzzled.

“They’ll whip you if you’re found up here.” Nodding to a door left ajar, the girl added, “I’m Eleanor. That’s my room.”

Rosalyn was shocked to realise she didn’t want to feed on this
one. It was a revelation, an unexpected crack in her shell. “I’m Rosalyn.”

“Are you hungry?”

Rosalyn shook her head. “I’ve fed already.”

The girl frowned and tiny lines formed along the sides of her dark eyes. Pushing past Rosalyn she looked beyond the shutters, checking the drop to the courtyard below and the sheer wall to an overhanging roof above.

“You came in the window.”

“I climb well.”

“Perhaps I should call the guards?” If she was asking herself the girl didn’t find the suggestion convincing. “But then you’d get whipped and that’s never fun. Maybe I’ll mention you to Giulietta in the morning.”

The girl’s room was huge and her bed had two mattresses, one on top of the other. Five white candles burnt in silver holders.
Five
, and
white
. Not yellow and stinking like normal people used when they could afford candles.

“You’re filthy.”

Not an insult, simply a statement of fact; although Rosalyn was as clean as she’d ever been. Cleaner probably, having scrubbed herself with grit.

“And that… dress.” Eleanor hesitated between words, unsure how to describe the rags Rosalyn was wearing. Something about the way she spoke…

“Do you know the duchess?” Rosalyn asked.

“How did you know?”

“You sound like her.”

“You’ve met?”

Rosalyn nodded. “Once. She was kind to me.”

“Really?”

And then she gave me up to be killed
.

Now seemed the wrong time to say that because Rosalyn had a feeling Eleanor thought she belonged at Alta Mofacon.

“First we must wash you,” Eleanor said. “Then find new clothes. After that we can talk properly.” Lifting a jug, she poured tepid water into a bowl and picked up a cloth, wetting it and rinsing it out. “Let’s start with your face.”

The wagon jolted up the track towards Alta Mofacon and the two girls giggled, giggles turning to shrieks as the younger slid from her precarious seat and landed on her back in freshly picked hops. The girls were drunk on the smell of the hops, the blueness of the sky and the whiteness of the lamb-like clouds dotting the sky field.

The bailiff had protested, smilingly, that it wasn’t really fitting for Lady Giulietta to travel by cart. Then added, a little wide-eyed, that of course my lady could help in the fields if that was what she wanted.

My lady had grinned happily and gone to change into a simple dress of homespun cloth a little better made than everyone else’s, and wrap her red hair against the sun in a plain scarf. The silver jewellery was gone. She no longer wore the widow’s weeds in which she’d arrived, or the scowls and tempers that began her journey. And if Eleanor had noticed Leopold’s ring no longer adorned Giulietta’s finger she appeared happy for her, without putting into words what she thought the change meant. Besides, Giulietta knew Eleanor had her own secrets.

Half Eleanor’s dresses seemed to have disappeared, her twine and lapis bracelet had gone missing, probably
lost
. In its place
oranges, ripe dates, pretty layered pebbles that looked as if they came from a beach. Eleanor smiled more, was happy to leave Giulietta to her own company.

“I’ve been making friends.”

It sounded like one of the local girls to Giulietta.

She’d never had the fierce friendships other girls had because she’d never been allowed. Still, why would she stop her cousin?

Giulietta spent much of her own nights talking to Tycho.

He seemed willing to listen, eager to learn. He asked questions and she answered: about Sigismund’s empire, how the trade routes made Venice rich, what might happen to the Byzantine Empire after John V Palaiologos died. Like her, he found Venice easier to like at a distance. In fact, she was sure they could grow to love it provided they didn’t have to return there.

Why would they want to? When they had Alta Mofacon.

Her wheat was cut, threshed and stored, her hay was made and straw gathered. Fences were mended, hedges replanted and ditches dug for the coming winter. The stone walls of half her field terracing had been rebuilt. Work had been found for everyone. When the bailiff protested, gently as always, that the estate could not afford such generosity, Lady Giulietta gave him her silver jewellery and told him she wanted apple trees planted and more wheat sown. Her birthday had come and gone in the time they were here. Lady Giulietta had let it pass quietly, not wanting a fuss to be made. Tycho gave her a kiss. Eleanor gave her a pebble.

“We’re here,” Eleanor said.

Giulietta grinned, slid from her seat, which was only a full hopsack in a sea of loose hops, and landed carelessly, laughing as she grabbed the cart’s side to save herself.

“My lady… !”

“Is fine,” she said. Turning a circle, she looked round her courtyard. The manor’s walls had been repainted a dark red that would fade to pink and then to ochre, which was the colour they’d been when she arrived.

“What news?”

Her steward looked troubled.

Although she suspected that had more to do with not ruining her sunny mood. Her aunt’s spy had already absconded, probably to take news back to the city of how her grief had been cleared by the warm winds, burnt off by the bright summer sun, worn away by hard work. Aunt Alexa would not approve of the work. Lady Giulietta wasn’t sure she cared.

“Tell me,” she said gently.

“Another dead priest beyond Port Monfalcone. Three now.”

“On my lands?”

The steward shook his head, smiled slightly. “No, my lady. Always just beyond your borders.”

“Tell me if one of my priests dies. What else?”

“There are wolves…”

Giulietta froze.

“There are always wolves,” he added hastily. “They come down from the mountains after the flocks. The boys have slings to keep them at bay.”

“Then why tell me?”

Some of the happiness had gone from her voice. But she still sounded so reasonable and unexpectedly polite that she knew few people who’d known her in the last few years would have recognised her.

The steward looked embarrassed.

So Giulietta waited.

“You know peasants,” he said finally, as if his own family didn’t come from such stock. “So superstitious.”

“Master Theo…”

The man sighed. “A swordsman kills them, my lady. That’s what they say. He cuts off their heads with a gleaming blade and tosses the bodies into ravines.”

“Has anyone found a beheaded wolf?”

“No, my lady. Exactly, my lady. That’s what I tell them. If
there was a swordsman beheading wolves we’d find beheaded wolf carcasses.”

“Tycho… How long has this been going on?”

Pulling up his knees, Tycho wrapped his arms around them and rested his chin on his intertwined fingers. He was sat on the end of Lady Giulietta’s great bed, her window open to allow in starlight, the night wind and him.

He was being careful.

He’d spent weeks being careful to do nothing to scare her. So they talked, or she talked and he listened and that was all they did. Or mostly all they did. Sometimes they kissed. Slowly made her happy. Fiercely made her worried. He stayed always just the right side of not upsetting her.

Recently she’d taken to falling asleep in his arms.

Tycho knew she knew it was a waiting game, but he was learning from the things she told him about Venice, and about history and politics. And he fed from Rosalyn when he must, and Rosalyn fed from her priests, because she liked their memories. And occasionally he’d abandon Giulietta to her sleep and go and kill
krieghund
before they could threaten her.

It was as close to perfect as his life had ever got.

The wind through her window smelt of lavender and dung, of hops from a wagon in the yard and wood smoke from a fire still burning in the kitchen range. He knew he would associate that mix of smells for ever with Alta Mofacon.

“For a week or so,” he admitted.

“A week or so?”

“All right, longer. The first two appeared the night after we arrived.”

“And what do they want?”

“I haven’t asked. They come in ones and twos.”

“And you kill them in ones and twos?”

“I kill the first and the second doesn’t usually dare venture further into your lands. They’re
krieghund
, obviously enough.”

“So was my husband.”

Tycho looked hurt, he couldn’t help himself.

“Jealous?” Giulietta asked.

“Always.”

Her face softened. But she still sighed.

“Found him yet?”

Prince Alonzo flushed. And Duchess Alexa watched in amusement as her brother-in-law fought to keep his temper. His vow to capture Tycho within a day was no closer to being fulfilled than when he made it weeks earlier.

They met at Alexa’s request in the map room, because she hoped the murals would help remind Alonzo of the dangers they faced. It was a century since the map of Europe had been repainted. She hoped it would be another century before it needed repainting again. She’d given up having the Asia maps redrawn to include Tamburlaine’s latest conquests and simply had Marco’s cartographer put a translucent green wash over what had been there before.

The Regent was drinking again, which was good in one way and bad in another. Drunk, her brother-in-law was impulsive. Sober, he was scheming and occasionally intuitive.

“More wine?” Alexa suggested.

A servant dashed forward to lift a jug before Prince Alonzo could do more than reach for it. She was young and pretty. Wide-hipped, dark-skinned and wavy-haired. Entirely to her
brother-in-law’s taste. Alexa saw the girl’s face tighten as his fingers found the back of her knee and began climbing.