The Outcast Blade (43 page)

“Someone said Tycho was here.”

“He landed an hour ago.”

“Then why isn’t he here?”

“
Giulietta…
”

“He should be here.” She looked around, as if expecting to find him hiding in the study somewhere.

“He went home to change.”

“Then he’s on his way…”

You don’t know that
, Alexa thought; but Giulietta obviously thought she did, because she abandoned the doorway and hurried along the upper colonnade oblivious to guards coming to attention around her.

There was a commotion in the Cortile del Palazzo, and a young man in black pushed his way through a crowd of outraged senators in scarlet robes leaving an evening meeting of the Greater Council.

His wolf-grey hair shone in the light of torches set around the courtyard. Ignoring the senators’ outrage, he scanned the upper corridor already knowing where to look. His eyes found the person he wanted and he waved.

Marble stairs existed to allow a stately progress from the upper galleries to the courtyard floor for the duke and his retinue. The finest architects in Italy had drawn up the plans between them.
At no little argument on their part, and no little expense on the part of the late duke.

Duchess Alexa – Mongol princess and widow of that duke – watched her niece, the daughter of a Millioni princess and a Byzantine prince, launch herself from the top of the stairs and run their entire length into the arms of the young man below, who swept her off her feet and swung her round like a child.

Alexa could hear Giulietta’s laughter from where she watched, hear her laughter and see the senators’ shock. Then the whole departing Senate and the servants and guards in the courtyard and the open corridors saw the young man wrap his fingers into Giulietta’s hair and raise her face so they could kiss.

And every one of them saw Alexa’s niece throw her arms around his neck as if clinging on for dear life.

Moving away from the window, Alexa sighed.

“The silver one makes me fall in love with you and the gold one makes you fall in love with me?” Grinning, Giulietta folded Tycho’s hand around the two pills in his palm and kissed his fingers.

“Save them,” she said.

“For what?”

“For when I fall out of love with you… That was a joke,” she added, seeing his expression. “I don’t need them. I never will.”

Slipping Dr Crow’s final creations back into a leather pouch, Tycho dropped it on the pile of clothes beside her bed. His clothes, discarded in a hurry.

“Do you think my aunt knows you’re here?”

“The whole palace knows.”

Giulietta blushed sweetly in the candlelight. Their love-making had been noisy and frantic and then noisy and slow. She couldn’t help it. He did things she hadn’t imagined possible.

“By tomorrow,” Tycho said, “the whole city will know. And then the world beyond. Does that matter to you?”

“This is Venice,” she said. “The world will expect no less.”
Tycho lost his grin at her next comment. “You realise,” Giulietta said, “Aunt Alexa intends to offer you the Blade?”

“I failed my apprenticeship.”

“You killed Iacopo, who was the previous master. You led the
krieghund
into a trap on Giudecca that damaged them as badly as they damaged us the year before. You sent Frederick home with his tail between his legs…”

Giulietta put a finger to his lips to still his protest, yelping when he bit it. “That’s how Aunt Alexa sees thing. You’d be wise to leave her thinking that.”

“She doesn’t know about giving Frederick the
WolfeSelle
?”

“The what…? She plans to make you a baron. Give you Atilo’s house to go with your own. Both of which the Ten will confirm. I swear she’d make you a member of the Ten if you weren’t so young.”

“I haven’t agreed to be Blade.”

“You will.”

When the candle burnt out, they lay in the darkness, covered by a single sheet that apparently left her chilly. Because she huddled closer and Tycho wrapped one arm around her to hold her tight.

“Can I ask something?” Giulietta said.

Tycho nodded, expecting a question about being Blade, or killing Andronikos. Neither he nor Giulietta had yet talked about what he became that night. He was uncertain what she had seen. How what had happened to him looked from the outside.

“Did you know about Rosalyn’s friendship with Eleanor?”

“No. Did you?”

Giulietta shook her head.

“Is that why Rosalyn left?”

“I imagine so…” Tycho sucked his teeth, cross with himself for not telling the whole truth. “At least in part. Also, Venice holds bad memories. I gave her money. She has her… abilities. I imagine we’ll hear of her one day.”

“Rosalyn is in love with you.”

Tycho froze. The girl in his arms seemed untroubled by what she’d just said. With Giulietta you could never be sure.

“I doubt it.”

Smiling, Giulietta kissed his brow. “A good man but oft-times a fool. Of course she’s in love with you. Having been friends with Eleanor doesn’t mean she can’t be in love with you as well…” Giulietta sighed.

“I wasn’t in love with her.”

“That’s why she left. No Eleanor and no you. My mother had estates in Carpathia. Towns and villages I’ve never seen.”

“I’m not sure…”

“They won’t come from me,” Giulietta said firmly. “They’ll come from Alexa, signed by Marco. A reward for her services to Venice. You understand I’m serious? About marrying you and making Venice a republic again?”

Tycho smiled.

There’s a misbegotten, misplaced belief that cats are independent creatures that might deign to eat your food and sleep in your bed but will vanish come morning, prefer to walk alone and do not need and can barely tolerate your company. When, in fact, they’re much like other pets but with better PR. Working writers are much the same. We survive because there’s a support network of lovers and friends, agents and publishing people ready to catch us when we get trapped up trees of our own making or walk out on branches too thin to take our weight.

My thanks go to them.

Charlie Hopkinson

J
ON
C
OURTENAY
G
RIMWOOD
was born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship. He grew up in the Far East, Britain and Scandinavia. Apart from novels, he writes for magazines and newspapers and travels extensively. For five years he wrote a monthly review column for
The Guardian
. He has also written for
The Times, The Telegraph
and
The Independent
.

Felaheen
, the third of his novels featuring Asraf Bey, a half-Berber detective, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. So did
End of the World Blues
, about a British sniper on the run from Iraq and running an Irish bar in Tokyo.
The Fallen Blade
, the first of three novels set in an alternate fifteenth-century Venice, was published in 2011.
The Outcast Blade
is the second book in the sequence. He has started work on the third.

His work is published in French, German, Spanish, Polish,
Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Danish, Finnish and American, among others

He is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker (
http://www.sambaker.co.uk
), currently editor in chief of
Red
magazine. They divide their time between London and Winchester.

If you enjoyed
THE OUTCAST BLADE,
look out for

THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS

by N. K. Jemisin

Yeine Darr is heir to the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. She is also an outcast. Until, that is, her mother dies under mysterious circumstances
.

Summoned by her grandfather to the majestic city of Sky, Yeine finds herself thrust into a vicious power struggle for the throne. As she fights for her life, she comes ever closer to discovering the truth about her mother’s death and her family’s bloody history—as well as the unsettling truths within herself
.

With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate are bound inseparably together, for both mortals and gods alike
.

I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore.

I must try to remember.

*   *   *

My people tell stories of the night I was born. They say my mother crossed her legs in the middle of labor and fought with all her strength not to release me into the world. I was born anyhow, of course; nature cannot be denied. Yet it does not surprise me that she tried.

*   *   *

My mother was an heiress of the Arameri. There was a ball for the lesser nobility—the sort of thing that happens once a decade as a backhanded sop to their self-esteem. My father dared ask my mother to dance; she deigned to consent. I have often wondered what he said and did that night to make her fall in love with him so powerfully, for she eventually abdicated her position to be with him. It is the stuff of great tales, yes? Very romantic. In the tales, such a couple lives happily ever after. The tales do not say what happens when the most powerful family in the world is offended in the process.

*   *   *

But I forget myself. Who was I, again? Ah, yes.

My name is Yeine. In my people’s way I am Yeine dau she Kinneth tai wer Somem kanna Darre, which means that I am the daughter of Kinneth, and that my tribe within the Darre people is called Somem. Tribes mean little to us these days, though before the Gods’ War they were more important.

I am nineteen years old. I also am, or was, the chieftain of my people, called
ennu
. In the Arameri way, which is the way of the Amn race from whom they originated, I am the Baroness Yeine Darr.

One month after my mother died, I received a message from
my grandfather Dekarta Arameri, inviting me to visit the family seat. Because one does not refuse an invitation from the Arameri, I set forth. It took the better part of three months to travel from the High North continent to Senm, across the Repentance Sea. Despite Darr’s relative poverty, I traveled in style the whole way, first by palanquin and ocean vessel, and finally by chauffeured horse-coach. This was not my choice. The Darre Warriors’ Council, which rather desperately hoped that I might restore us to the Arameri’s good graces, thought that this extravagance would help. It is well known that Amn respect displays of wealth.

Thus arrayed, I arrived at my destination on the cusp of the winter solstice. And as the driver stopped the coach on a hill outside the city, ostensibly to water the horses but more likely because he was a local and liked to watch foreigners gawk, I got my first glimpse of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’ heart.

There is a rose that is famous in High North. (This is not a digression.) It is called the altarskirt rose. Not only do its petals unfold in a radiance of pearled white, but frequently it grows an incomplete secondary flower about the base of its stem. In its most prized form, the altarskirt grows a layer of overlarge petals that drape the ground. The two bloom in tandem, seedbearing head and skirt, glory above and below.

This was the city called Sky. On the ground, sprawling over a small mountain or an oversize hill: a circle of high walls, mounting tiers of buildings, all resplendent in white, per Arameri decree. Above the city, smaller but brighter, the pearl of its tiers occasionally obscured by scuds of cloud, was the palace—also called Sky, and perhaps more deserving of the name. I knew the column was there, the impossibly thin column that supported such a massive structure, but from that distance I
couldn’t see it. Palace floated above city, linked in spirit, both so unearthly in their beauty that I held my breath at the sight.

The altarskirt rose is priceless because of the difficulty of producing it. The most famous lines are heavily inbred; it originated as a deformity that some savvy breeder deemed useful. The primary flower’s scent, sweet to us, is apparently repugnant to insects; these roses must be pollinated by hand. The secondary flower saps nutrients crucial for the plant’s fertility. Seeds are rare, and for every one that grows into a perfect altarskirt, ten others become plants that must be destroyed for their hideousness.