The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Star iron. We keep a collection.”

  It seemed the krieghund sought fragments of broken stars and hoarded them until new armour was needed. Then the dark and twisted lumps were added to molten steel, along with the charred skull of a wolf and a rusty nail. The resulting steel could be beaten so thin it had half the weight of ordinary plate.

  She doubted Frederick should be telling her Wolf Brother secrets but thanked him all the same. He seemed so proud of his clan’s cleverness. After the mail shirt came an open-faced helmet, vambraces for her arms, thigh guards and knee guards and a pair of half-gauntlets.

  The second-to-last crate contained white leather trews, a white jerkin, padded inside with folds of fabric, and gloves to fit in the half-gauntlets; all the sizes looked right, and it felt strange to realise Frederick had been watching her more carefully than she knew. Holding up the white leather doublet, she smiled.

  “Try it on,” he suggested.

  She shook her head, looked at the breastplate and hesitated . . . Her undergown was decent and it wasn’t as if she planned to put on full armour. She didn’t even need to put on the doublet to see if the breastplate fitted. Dropping the fur-lined houppelande from her shoulders, she stepped out of Alexa’s old gown, realising too late her undergown was thinner than she remembered.

  “Let me help,” Frederick said quickly.

  The metal was cold on her chest, the shoulder plates so hard at the edge of her upper arms that she shook her head. The vambraces chafed her wrists but she left them in place. The armour scalloping her hips was as heavy as a weighted belt. She and Frederick looked at the thigh guards and decided simultaneously that buckling them on might be a step too far.

  “Now this,” Frederick said. He opened a crate longer and thinner than the others and she knew before he dipped his hands into the straw what it held. She’d fought with sticks as a child, and Aunt Alexa had insisted she learn to handle a dagger, but she’d never studied swordplay or watched a tournament. Uncle Alonzo liked his jousts, and that was reason enough to despise them.

  It was a three-quarter sword, maybe slightly smaller.

  “Let me show you how to hold it.”

  Frederick stood behind her and his breath was warm on her neck as he put his arms around her and folded her fingers around the wire-wound hilt. The inside of his elbow brushed her breast where her breastplate scooped low and would be hidden beneath shoulder armour. Neither of them seemed to notice. Well, he didn’t. So she held her peace as well.

  “Now lift it so . . .”

  She struggled to raise the sword above her head. The weapon was heavier than she expected for all it was in the newest fashion and smaller than the swords old men used. Frederick stood right behind her now. She could feel him bump slightly against her back and buttocks. He noticed her unease because he stepped back and she almost let the sword fall down.

  “Find its balance point.”

  He was behind her again but careful not to touch anything except her hands, which he moved slightly up so the sword was exactly above her head.

  “Keep it like that . . .”

  Stepping round her, he drew his own sword and she recognised the WolfeSelle with a shiver. The krieghund totem had a new handle. That was why she hadn’t recognised it when sheathed.

  “Only until Leo is old enough,” Frederick said.

  Giulietta’s lips twisted. Frederick was guarding the blade until Leo came of age and assumed command of the Wolf Brothers. She had her own opinions about that. What made her eyes well up was simpler.

  “We’ll find him,” Frederick promised. “I swear.” He looked at the sword trembling in her upraised arms and smiled. “Now strike down to one side. Don’t tell me which. I’ll show you a block.”

  “Ready?” she asked.

  He grinned. “Always . . . Make it a real blow.”

  She swung her sword to the left as hard as she could – but he was there first, sparks exploding from their blades and the clang of steel so loud it deafened both as it echoed from the study walls. Her door smashed open and the man on guard rushed in, his halberd levelled and his face torn between fear and duty. He froze, obviously shocked. Whether at her in armour, the fact she was wearing only her undergown, or that she held a sword was harder to tell. “Sorry,” Giulietta said. “I’m having a lesson.”

  “My lady, I’m so sorry. I didn’t . . .”

  “Of course you didn’t.” She waved him and his apology from her room. “We’d better practise elsewhere,” she told Frederick.

  “We’ll practise on board.” He appeared serious.

  “Frederick, Marco will never . . .”

  “Demand it. You’re still the Regent, remember? Why do you think I had this made for you? I don’t expect you to fight,” he added hurriedly. “But you should have armour and I thought white would suit you.”

  Lady Giulietta put down her sword and let him unbuckle her armour, his fingers touching her side as he removed the metal skirt scalloping her hips. She blushed and he seemed not to notice. “I’m your squire,” he said, putting the armour back into its boxes. The last to be packed was her open-faced helmet.

  “People need to see you.”

  She wasn’t sure if he was making a general point or meant Marco’s followers needed to see her face. It turned out he meant the second. He had an idea for refining why Venice was going to war. It involved telling the truth. At least, a version of the truth closer to the real truth than the one currently being told. Having spent her life surrounded by those who dealt in lies and half-lies and held the truth close like hidden cards, she liked it. She liked it very much indeed. For a start, it meant she’d have the changeling in the nursery quietly fostered and forgotten. Only a few knew Alexa had put the nursemaid’s infant in the slaughtered child’s place, and they would keep silent.

  Calling for a messenger, Lady Giulietta dictated a proclamation that ignored the dead baby put in Leo’s place and simplified what had happened to something the city could understand and accept. The traitor Alonzo had stolen Leo, her son and Venice’s heir. The army of Venice was going to get him back.

  By nightfall, those who hadn’t already enlisted were thronging the Piazza San Marco demanding that they too be allowed to fight. No man between fourteen and sixty saw why he should be left behind. Marco was furious about the proclamation, but there was little he could do. He tried to tell Giulietta she couldn’t come. Giulietta replied that she was Regent; without her permission he couldn’t go at all. His going depended on her going. Leo was hers. She would go.

  Giulietta won.

  38

  And on the other side of the Adriatic Sea, in a strange fort built into the head of a high valley, the infant they argued about slept in a stronghold doorway, wrapped in rancid furs, while the man neither Giulietta nor Marco mentioned hacked the heads from dead archers and spiked them on spears arranged in a row. Their bodies he dragged through the stronghold and up stone steps to leave at the mouth of a cave – in case those who lived inside could use them. The weather was so cold that neither the bodies nor their glassy-eyed heads rotted.

  Roderigo’s corpse he impaled for his part on the night Tycho was captured in a silver net on Duchess Alexa’s orders. Under the tallow light of a cruel moon, he put Roderigo right in the middle of the line he’d arranged as a warning to anyone foolish enough to approach the walls. And as he wrestled the spear upright, and dropped its end into the hole he’d stabbed and twisted into frozen earth, he considered what the creature in the cave had said. It could all be lies, of course. Even that strange almost-memory of angels fighting and falling could be a lie. Perhaps he simply wanted it to be untrue . . .

  Although those in the cave left him untouched, he knew they watched, unless that was the elder goddess herself. Tycho suspected she was too old and too powerful to bother with lesser immortals any more.

  Leo was walking now.

  That was new. At least, he thought it was. He hadn’t paid the infant much attention e
xcept as an extension of Giulietta but he was pretty certain the walking was new and hoped she’d be pleased. He knew she would pass this way soon. He’d told her where he was and that he had Leo. If she didn’t come for him she’d come for the child. He was as certain of this as he was that the ice would soon thaw. So he slept his days in the armoury, which was windowless and had a door it was easy to bar, and woke each dusk to find the child sitting by him, looking thoughtful or puzzled, or whatever that strange Millioni expression was meant to be. He fed the infant on scraps collected from the satchels of the wild archers and wondered endlessly whether the goat-heeled creature had lied.

  “What do you think?”

  Leo didn’t care. Maybe he thought they should wait there for his mother.

  “Do you?” Tycho asked. The child burped and Tycho decided that was probably a stay here vote. He could almost hear Giulietta like a single note at the edge of his mind. Her name was written each night across the sky in stars. He had no doubt she was coming. He hardly dared imagine how she’d managed that. “She’ll be here soon.” Something he’d been promising for days.

  How would they greet each other? Would she see the guilt in his eyes?

  Tycho knew he was behaving like a child and felt shamed without knowing why. Inside his head was a cold darkness that stared back implacably, daring him to venture deeper. He’d thought everyone had that. Pulling a whetstone from his pocket, he drew his sword and dragged the stone along its edge, grinding away the jagged notches put there by his fight with Roderigo. As he did, he tried to still the fears in his head and realised that no whetstone existed to smooth out the notches in his soul . . .

  So, you think you have one after all?

  A soul? Maybe not, but Giulietta thought he did. He’d arrived in Venice without memories, only to regain fragments when near drowning washed his amnesia away, and Rosalyn, the ragged girl who pulled him from the canal, had been certain it was more than near drowning. He’d been dead when she spotted him floating by the stone steps at Rialto and dragged him ashore. How many times could one person die and still keep a soul?

  “All right, all right,” Tycho said.

  Leo was grizzling again. Keeping the toddler shit free and fed was a full-time occupation. The child had re-embraced life with a fierce hunger, lungs of steel and the ability to slime food scraps at both ends.

  Leo grinned as Tycho picked him up.

  “Yeah,” Tycho said. “Your father was a monster, too.” Pulling a chunk of stale bread from his pocket, Tycho tore off a mouthful, bit into an even harder sliver of ewe’s cheese and began to chew. The pulp he spat into his hand he gave the child, who ate it greedily. “I hope you appreciate it,” he said.

  The child with Giulietta’s eyes looked up at him.

  Tycho doubted he would forget Giulietta. Any more than he’d forget Afrior, the girl who died at the gates of Bjornvin and who he’d thought his sister, with all the bloody complication that caused. First Afrior, now this . . . With a shock, Tycho realised letting Leo go would be almost as hard as parting with Giulietta, and that would be unbearable. Heartbreaking, if he believed for a moment he had any heart left to break.

  “Shit,” he said. “You probably won’t even realise I’m gone.”

  Or was here at all. That was the brutal bit. To sacrifice and not be remembered, walk away and not be able to say why. Because how could Tycho say what he’d need to say to explain why this was happening . . .

  Things change.

  Well, he could hardly deny that. And some things, he thought bitterly, remain the same. Dawn was coming and Giulietta so close he could taste her on the last of the night wind. When daylight came he would hide. As he would have to hide every day between now and eternity if the creature from the cave told the truth. Time enough to get rich and powerful, if he could be bothered. For a fleeting moment, he fantasised about being the next Tamburlaine, and building an empire across time as well as distance. An immortal emperor of a never-dying empire . . . An endless succession of empresses beautiful enough to make him forget Giulietta. She’d become that young Italian woman with the red hair whose name he couldn’t remember, except that he’d always remember it. He knew himself too well.

  After he carried Leo into the fort and up the guard steps to the battlements, the cold winds sweeping up the valley blew his fantasies away. He might change his name and build another life but he had no wish to rule for the sake of it. If he really had all of time as his playground he’d find better things to do with it. But that could come later; first he needed to do the impossible . . . Return Leo and lie to the woman he loved.

  “You keep what you’ve seen to yourself,” he told the infant.

  Leo grinned.

  The army marched between the white slopes of the valley and the ground under their feet was so hard it might have been stone. Weeks of freezing weather had turned the snow solid, while furious winds along the valley floor had scoured away any drifting snow that might have softened it.

  They took the simplest route and kept to the lowest valleys and would have taken another two days to reach the fort had Tycho not brought Leo to meet them. There were more men than Tycho expected. Although he was not to know – and only discovered later – that Marco had used a quarter of those who accompanied him to secure the port and garrison towns along the way, having already sent half his men to the capital with orders to take it peacefully if possible, bloodily if not. The old Montenegrin aristocracy had used the feud between Marco and Alonzo to declare their own independence. Marco needed to secure the capital for Venice. He intended to besiege Alonzo’s headquarters himself.

  So the men marched through wisps of drifting snow, heads down, one foot placed stolidly in front of the other, becoming simply an army, that great unthinking creature on the move. The creature had walked in daylight, slept fitfully, moved again under the light of a tallow moon – and would soon sleep again, before moving on. In years to come armies would grow but for now ten thousand was large and fifteen thousand immense. And though Marco had brought somewhere between these numbers, he’d divided his forces so often that fifteen hundred marched unknowing towards where Tycho waited.

  Well, most marched: two hundred knights rode at the column’s head and a dozen outriders protected each flank. It was one of the outriders who noticed Tycho framed against the dawn. He shouted a warning that had his companions falling into battle order. Tycho hated them for ending this part of his life.

  The early sun flared like flame on his shoulders.

  He might as well have stood with his back to the mouth of hell. His clothes felt on fire, but his jacket had nothing to fear. His flesh was the only thing likely to burn. But he had chosen a spot where they would see him and see him they had. Stepping now into shadow, Tycho blew out his breath in gratitude. Leo looked untroubled. Down in the valley, however, the column scrabbled like a kicked-over ants’ nest. At an order, a dozen archers broke from the column and strung their bows, notching arrows and judging distances as they watched him descend.

  “I have Prince Leo,” Tycho shouted.

  He lifted the giggling child high above his head and relied on the last of the moon and the first of the sun to let them see the prince was happy and unharmed. One of the archers recognised Tycho’s wolf-grey braids and a roar of outrage went up. Outlaw, kill him and bastard. Still they hesitated, watching as he stalked towards them. Tycho was wanted for Alexa’s murder and could hardly claim he hadn’t killed her. But Prince Leo clung to him and a safe shot was impossible.

  “Suppose I should thank you,” Tycho muttered.

  Leo burbled.

  “H-h-hold . . .” The order came from the column’s front where a knight in the purple, white and gold of Venice whirled his mount and cantered towards the archers, flanked by a knight in gilded armour and another in white plate. “L-let the g-grievous angel approach.”

  “I have Leo, your highness.”

  Tycho lifted the princeling and the knight in white plate spurred hi
s mount, causing the man in gilded armour to shout a warning. Scree shifted and the white-armoured rider dragged at his horse’s head to stop it sliding on the slope.

  “Give him to me . . .”

  It couldn’t be, and yet Tycho knew it was.

  Lady Giulietta sat armoured and astride a panting warhorse, reins folded into one hand, her other hand reaching towards her son. Tycho wondered sadly why he’d expected anything else. He’d been proud of her from the moment they met. Her fierce intelligence, the quiet fury with which she met life full-on. It was only seeing her now that made him realise how utterly desperate she must have been the night she knelt before the stone mother and tried to take her own life.

  The knight in gilded armour spurred his mount forward and Lady Giulietta turned to smile . . . Instantly, Tycho wanted to kill him. He wanted to pull his guts through a slit in his stomach. The wave of jealousy shocked him. “We haven’t really met,” the knight said. The young man’s expression was guarded.

  Swallowing his fury, Tycho recognised Frederick, Leopold’s brother. In Frederick, Tycho saw echoes of Leopold, who’d begun as Tycho’s enemy and ended as his friend. This man, however, was no friend.

  “Your highness . . .”

  “Lord Tycho.”

  “Hello, angel.” Duke Marco grinned.

  Tycho bowed. “Your mother . . .”

  “I k-know,” said Marco. “Killed by B-Byzantine assassins. Hideous. I’m so sorry you were blamed unjustly.” He edged his mount forward, putting himself between Tycho and the others, and them between him and the archers. “Well,” he said quietly. “I can h-hardly say you’re the head of m-my Assassini and my m-mother ordered her own d-death, can I . . .? Now, put J-Julie out of her m-misery.”

  Stepping round Marco’s horse, Tycho lifted the child. His fingers touched the metal at her gauntlet and he missed the spark that usually flared between them. “My lady . . . Your son.”

  “T-thank him,” Marco said. “He g-got your son back.”

  Lady Giulietta dipped her head.