The last thing Frederick did before retiring was send for one of his men and give him a message for his father. Frederick had let Alexa believe he was here without the emperor’s blessing. In fact, he had left court with permission. It was time to make his first report.
“Yes, highness . . .” The man bowed low.
Standing at the window a few minutes later, Frederick watched a young wolf skulk out on to the ice of the Canalasso and disappear into the night. The journey across the snows would be brutal, but his message would arrive. If anyone could clear the distance and arrive safely it was them. They were krieghund.
In the same hour, on the far side of the Adriatic Sea, which glittered with white crests on black waves, halfway into a range of mountains that rose for ever, the man named earlier as Lady Giulietta’s next husband scowled at the crude walls of that night’s shelter and thought about Venice not at all. Tycho was too cold and too hungry and too worried to think about anything other than the yard in which he stood.
The map Marco had provided was crude, but the fort was on it and had always been marked as one of their stops. Everything about the place felt wrong, starting with its shape, which was a quarter-circle of grey stone, built across the narrow head of the valley, with rising cliffs and a slit cave behind. At first Tycho thought the fort must protect a silver mine because what else in this godforsaken country would need protecting? Only the arrow slits faced in both directions, down the valley and into this tiny yard behind. No force big enough to trouble a fort could gather here so why did the arrow slits exist? The other reason the cave couldn’t be a silver mine was that the track marks where sleds had been dragged from underground were missing.
The heaviest wall was on this side rather than facing into the valley. The door on the valley side was thick, but the door to the yard thicker still and fat-hinged, with a steel plate set into it through which three dozen arrows could be fired simultaneously from a three-stringed porcupine.
The layout made so little sense that Tycho began to explore. Under the roof a dormitory full of abandoned bedrolls, saddles and curved sabres showed that cavalry had manned the fort until recently. At ground level the empty cupboards in the kitchen showed they’d taken any food with them. And they’d obviously left in a hurry because a half-cooked but now frozen deer carcase rested on an iron spit above a cold fire pit. In the yard someone had killed a horse and flensed its carcase, cutting all the flesh from its bones. Tycho could imagine how hungry cavalry would have to be before they ate their mounts.
A well in the cellar held water sealed with ice that clattered three seconds after Tycho dropped a stone. His second stone was larger, broke the ice and brought Amelia running . . . “Found anything?” she asked.
Tycho shook his head. “You?”
“Well, maybe . . .” she admitted. Amelia was wrapped in furs that stank even in the cold, unless the stink was her and that was possible. “There’s burnt-out mage powder on the armoury floor.”
That begged two questions. How Amelia recognised mage powder, because he didn’t think he would. And what the hell it was doing in a crumbling fort in the pits of nowhere. Mage powder was a mix made by alchemists that burnt so hot it cut steel and so fiercely water couldn’t put it out.
“How much?”
Pinching her finger and thumb together, Amelia looked cross when he snorted. “There’s also an empty barrel.”
The barrel was small, and had been stored inside a bigger one filled with sand. The sides of both were varnished and their bottoms and lids sealed with slugs of tar that took the imprint of Tycho’s thumb. Whoever stored the powder had been determined to stop air from getting in and setting it alight. It might take a minute or so before the grains of phosphor sparked, but once the mix was ignited it would be unstoppable. So why had it been opened and emptied?
Pushing open the rear door, Tycho stepped into the small, rocky yard formed by the fort closing off the very head of the valley. Icy slopes rose on both sides and where they joined the slit cave showed dark and daunting. Tycho knew instantly what the soldiers had used the powder for. Flame marks darkened the underside of a cracked ledge high above. Mage powder made a poor explosive, but they’d still tried, and failed, to close the cave.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s see what they intended to hide.”
“No.” Amelia grabbed his arm, letting go when he swung round to face her. He expected her to step back but she stood there shaking her head. The woman was Assassini trained, as fast as him and almost as deadly. He thought for a moment that she might be joking, her humour being somewhat strange, but she seemed serious.
“We have no business here.”
What has that to do with anything? By definition the Assassini went where they had no business. The shadows embraced them and in turn the Assassini embraced the shadows. He was simply the logical conclusion to that. A man so in love with darkness he couldn’t stand the light. Tycho stopped, shocked by the unexpected insight. Where had that come from?
“Gods,” he said. “I’ll search it myself later.”
If he read the fallen rubble right the vanished soldiers had tried to cause a rockslide that would bury the slit cave, but failed. They’d risked handling mage powder, but been too frightened or in too great a hurry to try again and had abandoned a second barrel inside the rear door. The fort’s layout finally made sense to him. It was built to protect the valley from whatever was in the cave, not the other way round. Whatever was in there probably knew Tycho and Amelia were here. All the same, he saw no point in attracting attention.
“No fires,” he said.
Amelia glared at him. “We’ll freeze.”
It was so cold they ended up huddled in a bed they found in a small room beyond a dormitory full of soldiers’ cots. Both rooms were bleak and made the fort look like a punishment posting. Tycho wondered what the men had done to be sent here. For the captain to live so close to his soldiers also seemed odd until Tycho realised the men would have to be dead before an enemy could reach the inner room.
Dragging a rancid bear’s pelt from the bed, Amelia dropped it on the floor in disgust, tied back flyblown bed curtains and looked round for something to replace the stinking bear skin. Two chests were empty but a third contained blankets so cold one cracked when she shook it. Amelia’s breath came in smoky gasps as she laid five blankets over a stained horsehair mattress. “You could have helped.”
Tycho put his whetstone back in his pocket and his dagger back in its sheath. “You could have gone into the cave . . .”
Amelia didn’t reply. Instead, she shrugged off her cloak and dragged at her boots, which she tossed to the floor. Her sword she put upright against the wall, her daggers on the chest where the blanket had been. She climbed into bed in silence and watched him put aside his own weapons and climb in beside her.
“Against the cold,” he said.
“Like it would be anything else.”
Lord Atilo had bedded her, whether when she was his slave or his apprentice Tycho was unsure. He imagined she’d kill any man who now tried to take her against her will, but the bonds of ownership or duty had kept his old master safe. She lay stiff as a board beside him for so long he thought she’d fallen to sleep; until finally she sighed, rolled in against him, tightened her arm across his chest, folded her leg over his hip to hold him in place and said sourly, “Now let me sleep. And you do whatever you call whatever you do . . .” A few minutes later, she spoke again in a voice smoky with darkness and age-old mystery. Wherever Tycho was, she was somewhere else.
“I am the moon . . . I am the mistress . . .”
Her words were a whisper in the silence of the snowscape beyond the fort walls. She was saying a prayer, he realised. A prayer addressed to a goddess unknown to him. He remembered that other night, on the edge of a cold fondamenta in Venice, when she’d talked of the moon, her mistress; and before he could unpick the memories of their first meeting, darkness took him. He woke to find her still in his arms,
her body rigid as wood, one hand jabbing his side.
“Wake up.” Her voice was tight.
It couldn’t be the next night already? But the colour of the sky beyond a broken shutter was still just this side of midnight rather than early the next, and he’d lost more than an hour to dreamless sleep. Amelia jabbed her hand at him harder. “All right,” he said.
He was rising on to his elbow when a sword point touched his throat and he opened his eyes. The man with the blade was filthy, crop-haired and half drunk with exhaustion. “What have we got here, boys?” Behind him soldiers clustered closer and one lifted a freshly lit torch that still smoked and spluttered.
“Pretty boys,” the man said. “Pretty boys in bed together.” He looked back at his men, gauging their reaction. “You know what that is, don’t you? It’s a hanging offence.”
17
The day began with sun squinting over the distant sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon and lighting a path so bright across the ice that it lit Venice in a glow that made the buildings golden and the icicles sparkle. Above a balcony at the back of Ca’ Ducale the sparkling icicles hung like glass bars; as if the cold wanted to cage them and the sun was trying to brighten their prison in compensation.
It was, Lady Giulietta admitted, a strange and beautiful sight for all it was unnerving. Seeing the sun made her happier than she’d been in days, though it did little to melt the icicles and nothing at all to melt the snow that covered the small garden at the back of the palace and turned rose beds into ghostly squares. Looking down on to that garden was where Prince Frederick found her after his morning meeting with her Aunt Alexa.
“Your page told me where you were.”
“I don’t have a page.” As she said this, she saw Tycho’s urchin behind Frederick, shuffling his feet and dressed in Millioni scarlet. At Pietro’s stricken look, she added, “Not officially, anyway.” Gods, when had she started caring about the feelings of street children? When she met Tycho probably, that was when most things changed. For the better? Well, life was less interesting back then, also safer and quieter and a lot less strange.
“The view’s better on the other side . . .”
Frederick meant from Ca’ Ducale’s grandest balcony, the one that looked over the herringbone brick of the piazzetta towards a clump of poplars frequented by lovers and thieves and the occasional equestrian needing to tie his horse. Hardly anyone rode in Venice, apart for the Dolphini; and they only did it to show off, and even they weren’t stupid enough to ride in this weather. All the same, when they reached the other balcony Giulietta saw a grey horse tethered to a distant tree.
“Mine,” said Frederick, following her gaze.
“You like riding?”
“Everyone likes riding.”
“I hate it. Everyone sensible hates it.” Her father had ridden. The only time Lady Giulietta remembered him smiling was when he was with his horses. She made herself unbunch her fists and felt sweat trickle from under one arm down her ribs inside her dress to soak her waistband. Giulietta hated that his memory could still do this to her. She also knew Frederick was staring.
“I’m going inside.”
He nodded absent-mindedly and looked at his horse, his head tipped a little to one side. “Have you done much riding?”
Giulietta ignored his question.
“They’re very gentle creatures really.”
She opened her mouth to disagree, reddening when he nodded in sudden understanding. “It’s not the horses you dislike. It’s the people who ride them.” Frederick waited for her to say he was wrong and smiled to himself when she didn’t. “We’re not all bad,” was all he said.
“I rode as a child,” she admitted. “Well, I was carried.”
How could she forget? The sky above Venice was changing from the pale blue of the Virgin’s cloak to an azure rich enough to be the sea in a newly painted fresco. It would darken over the afternoon through Persian blue to purple and then black. When she’d been carried as a child the sky had been steel-grey, the mountain wind vicious as a knife as it slid between the rips her father’s whip had cut in her clothes. Lord Atilo had placed her in front of him, until the gale made her so tearful he put her behind him and tied her on. Lady Giulietta shivered.
“We should go back inside,” Frederick said.
“Not yet . . .”
When he vanished through the arch behind her, Giulietta thought for a second he’d left without bothering to say goodbye. She was preparing to be really offended when he reappeared with a richly embroidered cloak, which he draped carefully around her shoulders against the cold.
“Are you trying to woo me?”
“I’m not that stupid.” Frederick’s smile was light. “You shivered. I’m simply trying to stop you from freezing . . .” He hesitated, and decided to ask anyway. “Where is Sir Tycho? I’d thought to have seen him by now.”
“Lord Tycho,” Giulietta corrected. “He was made a baron.”
Frederick smiled ruefully. “For defeating me? Or for defeating the Byzantines . . .? No, let me guess. For defeating us both.”
Giulietta nodded.
“Is it true he was born a slave?”
“Possibly . . .” She hesitated in her turn. Should she discuss this with him? She’d had no one else to discuss anything with since . . . And how could Tycho leave like that in the middle of the night, without even saying goodbye? When she’d asked him not to go? He was probably dead already . . .
A hand touched her shoulder. “You’re crying,” Frederick said.
“It’s the poppy,” Giulietta said furiously. “My aunt gave me too much poppy and now I can’t stop . . .” She caught his look and shrugged. “Well, it’s mostly the poppy. I was thinking about . . . About my lady-in-waiting.”
“Lady Eleanor?”
Giulietta was surprised he knew her name. “She made a better lady-in-waiting than I made mistress. We were cousins and I never made enough of that. Now she’s gone and I miss her.”
He shrugged. “Of course you do. We all need someone to talk to. I miss my brother. Leopold was . . .”
“Brave, funny, handsome, fearless?”
“You loved him, didn’t you?”
“It was complicated.”
Frederick laughed, the first time she could remember. “Of course it was complicated. With Leopold everything was complicated, his fierce friendships with men who began not certain they liked him and ended up devoted, and his love affairs with women who began by admiring him and ended up unable to bear being in the same room. Yet, you love him still, it seems to me. And he loved you to the end. I wonder what was different?”
He didn’t take me to his bed. Well, not for that. They slept enough nights in each other’s arms, talking or staring at the ceiling, his hand on her belly in the early days to feel the child who wasn’t his kick with life. He even found her the surgeon who cut open her belly when her precious child refused to be born, and sewed her up again with the tail hair from a horse, long after the midwife had given both mother and baby up for dead. Prince Leopold had married her, adopted her child, named Leo his heir and died to save her. But he never once bedded her.
“There’s something I have to tell you.” Frederick must have heard the seriousness in her voice because his smile faded and he turned towards her. “It’s about my son . . .” He opened his mouth to say how sorry he was and shut it when she held up her hand, stilling him. She knew he was sorry. He’d said it several times and meant it every time. “Leo’s not dead.”
“Giulietta . . .” There was sorrow in Frederick’s voice.
He thought her mad with grief, and she couldn’t help if her eyes filled with tears, could she? When she turned away, he turned her back and tried to hug her. Her hand slid from his chest to his face as she pushed free, and she froze, appalled he might think she’d hit him on purpose.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
As he stepped back, she grabbed him and refused to let go. She
was crying openly now, fierce sobs that made her face hideous. “It’s true,” she said. “I promise you. It’s true.”
Frederick shook his head. He was biting his lip and she realised – with shock – was close to crying himself. “My love,” he said, and she pretended not to hear that. “I’m so sorry, but it’s not.” Pulling her close, he told her life could be horrid but she’d survive. If he could, she could.
And then she cried until she could cry no more.
18
Rough hands reached for Tycho and he tensed until a touch at his side stilled him. Amelia was fully awake and watchful, her fingers tugging at the lace that held her ankle dagger in place.
“Hanging offence,” the man holding the sword repeated. He glanced back at his followers and seemed disappointed that they looked less enthusiastic than he expected. “Isn’t it, boys? The Pope says so.”
When you lived in a world where it was wise to nod when the Pope’s name was mentioned you nodded, and so they did. Their captain looked happier as he pulled back the covers and raised his eyebrows at the way Tycho’s and Amelia’s limbs were twisted together. As if soldiers had never clung together against the cold.
Tycho would have knocked the man’s sword aside but for a long-faced archer with an arrow aimed at Amelia’s heart. Tycho knew Amelia moved fast, she had were-blood and was Assassini trained. The question was what she could survive in the way of wounds. He’d have risked it for himself. Tycho’s smile was sour. He’d definitely have risked if for himself.
“Something funny?” their captain asked.
Tycho shrugged.
“Get them up,” the man said, and Tycho felt himself dragged from the bed. They reached for Amelia and she froze. For a moment Tycho thought she’d risk the arrow, but she allowed herself to be stood upright, her eyes never leaving the archer’s bent bow.
“Right, find me some hanging rope.”
A soldier disappeared through the door with one of the lit torches and the narrow chamber lurched into half-darkness. “And find me some more torches,” the captain called after him.
The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini Page 9
