The Outcast Blade (34 page)

“Tea,” she said. “I need tea.”

Marco laughed.

“But first…” Alexa did as her son had, turned Rosalyn’s face to the light and stared into her eyes. As the girl leant into her touch, Alexa realised there was a child inside the animal. Something living inside what had been dead.

“Help Ellie,” Rosalyn begged.

“You’re friends?”

The girl’s nod was simple.

Her muddy dress was Eleanor’s cast-off, which was why it looked familiar. Her thread and lapis bangle was one Giulietta gave Eleanor when she grew bored with it. Looking at the anguish in Rosalyn’s face as she turned away, Alexa knew boredom was not the reason the bracelet changed hands a second time.

“You knew about this friendship?”

Obviously, Lady Giulietta didn’t.

“Rosalyn may stay.”

The others took that as their signal to leave.

“My Aunt Alexa knows the ragged girl?”

“It’s a long story,” Tycho said.

“How could they have met? Come to that, how could your ragged girl have met Eleanor, never mind become such friends?”

“Her name’s Rosalyn,” Tycho said gently.

They were sitting in a window seat, half hidden by a curtain flapping in the pre-dawn breeze. Ignoring Giulietta’s scowl, Tycho ran a sharpening stone along the edge of the
WolfeSelle
. The stone was inset in a small cedar block.

“I mean, how could they?”

He shrugged, swiped the stone along the blade and hoped she wouldn’t ask again because he had no answer. Luckily, his care for the
WolfeSelle
took her attention instead.

“Does it really need sharpening?”

Plucking a red hair from her head without asking, he ran the strand against the edge and it parted immediately. “The sword likes it.”

She snorted.

Tycho envied her faith that Aunt Alexa had antidotes to the poisons used on that arrow, that surgeons could be found to
remove the arrow cleanly, that Eleanor would be same person when she recovered.

That life could not be that unkind.

“You realise it could have been…” Giulietta put a hand to her mouth, looking sick at herself. “What a thing to say. I almost said…”

“It could have been you?”

“I was going to say Aunt Alexa.” Lady Giulietta looked ashamed, a rare expression for her and one Tycho wasn’t sure he’d seen before. “Eleanor’s my
cousin
. When her parents…” She shrugged. “It’s a messy story and coming here should have made her life better. She was happy to be away from home and I…”

Tycho waited.

“I didn’t want to share Aunt Alexa so I took my own unhappiness out on her. I don’t even know why you’re in love with me…”

“
Giulietta
.”

“I mean it. She’s nice, prettier, kinder.”

Tycho smiled. “She’s not you.”

Lady Giulietta told him she’d be too heavy as he lifted her on to his lap. She weighed almost nothing. In the minutes that followed she told him to keep his hands to himself and he almost managed it.

He couldn’t have done so a year earlier.

The control that stopped him feeding on the dying, or turning in the presence of spilt blood in the banqueting hall, kept him staring at the lagoon and nodding at her words, though his hand rested on her hip and he could feel her shift on his lap. Her scent was rich with contradictions.

All the things he could say and all the things he couldn’t. Most love affairs must be like that, if that’s what this was. His love for Giulietta felt as fraught as the situation in the world outside. The emperor’s anger would need to be turned aside. Frederick was on his barge. And Tycho was still officially outlawed.

When he said that, Giulietta laughed.

Whatever the new guards outside Lady Eleanor’s sickroom had been told it obviously didn’t include Tycho’s part in saving Prince Frederick, or the fact he was free to roam the palace. On the other hand, there were the clothes he now wore.

He made an impressive officer of the palace guard.

“Sir, you can’t…”

“Yes,” said Marco. “He c-can.”

As the duke prised himself from the floor Tycho wondered if anyone else had noticed Marco’s stammer and twitches were mostly gone. Wondering also if they’d still be gone in the morning. Giulietta had told him of Marco’s change. The fierce intelligence that suddenly confronted her.

“New c-clothes?”

“Temporary. Giulietta found them for me.”

“They s-suit you.”

“Your highness, I’m told there’s a prisoner.”

“I b-believe a man was caught trying to escape.”

“May I question him?”

“Of course.” Marco hesitated. “I’m glad you like Giulietta. She needs someone to l-like her. You will be k-kind to her though, won’t you?” They could have been a brother and friend worrying about the first one’s young sister. For Duke Marco his guards simply didn’t exist. “You need to see my m-mother first?”

Tycho nodded.

The duke knocked on the door himself.

Smoke filled the sickroom from burning herbs on a brazier and the heaviness of the herbs made the air thicker than ever. As Tycho entered, the duchess flicked down her veil and turned crossly. Whatever she’d been about to say went unsaid when she saw his uniform; instead she nodded.

“There are worse disguises.”

Rosalyn knelt by Eleanor’s bed with a silver bowl and a sponge
she used to wipe the body of the girl in front of her. She made a move to cover Eleanor’s nakedness and the duchess shook her head.

The injured girl was little more than a child.

The girl at her side not much older, yet the determination with which one cooled the other was so adult it made them look more childish still. When Tycho turned back the duchess was staring at him. “We should talk.”

“Later, my lady. I must go to the dungeons.”

“To sleep? While your apprentice risks…” Duchess Alexa indicated the curtains. Rosalyn would be at the mercy of anyone who decided to open a curtain or throw wide a door to let in sunlight. Although Tycho doubted Alexa would let that happen.

“I’m going to question the prisoner with Marco’s permission.”

“
Marco’s…?
”

Tycho nodded.

“I expect you to bring me answers.”

And I expect to deliver my answers to Marco… If he is the same man tomorrow. If not, they will be yours
.

As Tycho left, he heard the click of a lock and knew Alexa would keep Rosalyn safe from the daylight, as surely as both of them would stay at Lady Eleanor’s side. The same guards stood in the corridor. Only now Duke Marco stood at a window staring at seagulls. “Venice,” the duke said, pointing at the gulls fighting each other for food. He hesitated, steeled himself to say something. “Would you like me to c-come with you?”

“No, highness. It might be best if I do this alone.”

Builders had lined the dungeon with Istrian stone centuries before to stop groundwater from flooding the cells, although moisture still seeped between the blocks, finding its way through mortar that was supposed to be waterproof.

In Rome, the jetties on the River Tiber still stood a thousand
years after they’d been built but the formula for
opus signinum
was lost. All the same the Venetian version was close and the gaoler expected Tycho to be impressed by the watertightness of his prison.

Tycho nodded at a locked door. “Total darkness?”

“Absolute. The walls are thick enough to support storerooms above.”

“And light from the corridor?”

The gaoler knew who his visitor was. Even if he couldn’t read the posters offering a thousand ducats for Tycho’s capture, he’d have had them read to him from the pulpit. Now the outlaw was here, dressed in the uniform of a duke’s guard and free, confident and obviously expecting to be given the answers he asked for.

“Does light show around the door?”

“A little. At the very bottom.”

“You have sandbags?”

Of course he had. Every official building in Venice had sandbags against the effects of the
acqua alta
, the high tides that periodically flooded the city.

“Fetch me some before you go.”

“But, my lord, I thought you would need my…” He looked at Tycho’s uniform. “It will be messy.”

“It will be very messy.”

The flatness of Tycho’s voice and the darkness in his eyes made the gaoler even more nervous. Tycho could read his fear. A further shrivelling of a spirit withered from years working here.

“I sent for a Black Crucifer,” the man said.

“Well, unsend for him.”

This was too close to blasphemy for the gaoler, so he bowed low and returned a minute later under the weight of three sandbags. After that he left, shutting the passage gate behind him. Tycho didn’t need the man to secure the bolt on the prisoner’s door; no one would be going anywhere.

The air inside the cell stank of shit curled out on a damp floor, the thick stone walls were layered with centuries of pain, and the darkness was absolute. Well, it was unless you were him. Tycho felt something stir in his gut. Felt the beast he’d been starving for days rattle at the bars of his ribs and grinned.

Tycho ignored it.

“I won’t tell you anything.”

Mamluk
, he thought. Perhaps Greek? The man spoke bad Italian with the roughness of someone from further south.

“Believe me. You won’t have a choice.”

The only survivor of the assassins stared into the darkness. His training told him to identify where his enemy stood, only Tycho now stood somewhere else, and even if the man could free himself from the heavy block of wood to which his feet had been nailed nothing in his training would be enough to take him past Tycho, or prepare him for what was going to happen next.

“I don’t know anything anyway.”

That was closer to the truth, but he would know more than he thought and Tycho wanted everything, even things he thought he didn’t know.

“I’ll take what you have.”

The ceiling was arched and the blocks of stone huge.

Slaves, Tycho decided. Slaves lost their lives building this place. It had ghosts before the first prisoner died in one of these cells. As Tycho made himself wait to prove he could, he examined his surroundings and gave his captive time to become truly afraid. Fresh pain the prisoner was expecting; this silence he was not. Both men opened their mouths at the same time.

The prisoner to beg, Tycho to feed.

Every wall around him lit as if flaming coals heaped the cold stone floor. Flesh began to smoulder where Tycho’s dog teeth ripped it. Dancing flames reflected from glistening walls and encased Tycho’s body without burning him.

Screams filled the tiny cell.

Those of pain and terror, and those of wild joy.

Inside Tycho’s chest, his ribs tightened and his legs and arms flooded with pain so vicious every long bone in his body felt as if smashed with hammers as a whip master forced him to climb stone steps on broken elbows and knees.

The beast inside threw itself at the bars and he threw it back. It growled and snarled, tore at his mind to fight free, but Tycho didn’t turn. The tearing flesh and twisting bones that remade him into something other on the night of the Mamluk battle never came. The greatest victory of his life to date.

A fight with himself no one else could see.

The prisoner had been a Byzantine spy, highly trained and travelling with amulets that let him avoid triggering all but the strongest watching spell. Even without talismans he’d been good enough to stay alive longer than most of his friends.

A thousand gold coins for every dead Millioni woman, five thousand for Marco, five thousand for Frederick, Marco was to die first… He should have known the job was poison, he would miss his family. Let no one say Tycho couldn’t purge sins as easily as a Crucifer.

This was what Giulietta must never see.

A blood-splattered cell and the drained husk of something that had once been human. And ready to sleep out the day on flagstones beside it, another husk that feared it had not been human for a while.

Frederick’s barge remained at anchor in the lagoon for a week following the disastrous feast at the new banqueting hall. His crew remained on board. Messages delivered by the Dogana guard went unanswered. When it seemed likely the barge intended to remain where it was, Alexa sent fresh bread, beef, apples, wine, small beer and three of her most trusted food tasters.

A single line from the prince thanked her for the courtesy and hoped her health was well. Alexa suspected he wrote that himself.

Even those who’d only heard about the attack at third or fourth hand decided he must be waiting for a reply from his father to a report sent shortly after the feast. So, the city waited with him, and Lady Eleanor hung between life and death, feverish and tearful, tended by the best doctors Alexa could find, and guarded by the ragged girl Alexa had ordered be allowed to come and go at will.

The house in San Aponal was once again Tycho’s.

That this was Marco’s decision gave Alexa hope: he stammered less, seemed more sure of himself and appeared to understand much of what was going on. Alexa half expected Giulietta to return to Ca’ Friedland and had wondered if Tycho would go
with her and whether she should object. In fact Giulietta slept at Ca’ Ducale and so did Tycho, and Alexa was surprised to discover she didn’t mind.

All the same, she hadn’t slept for three nights and the strain was beginning to tell. Her dragonet was exhausted from over-flying Frederick’s barge, looking for something Alexa hadn’t spotted last time.

Nero, her huge black fruit bat, had passed from rumour to myth as he plagued the city, swirling over night markets, jagging his way the length of the Riva degli Schiavoni looking for something she might have missed. Alexa
knew
something was wrong; until she knew what she would be unable to sleep.

“My lady…?”

“Boiling water,” she ordered, “in my study. And bring me cold water from the rain bucket, white wine and fresh fruit. You may return to bed afterwards.”

Her maid curtsied and walked backwards from the room.

The boiled water was to make tea and the cold water to fill the jade bowl her nephew had given her; the wine she would tip away after the first glass. Alexa wanted a clear head for scrying. Fresh fruit was about the only thing in this city she found edible. In the early days of her marriage Marco had suggested she learn to eat his people’s food, and seemed surprised she agreed so readily, little knowing this had already been explained to her.