The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini (29 page)

Four of his men carried wooden crates into her study on the third floor of Ca’ Ducale, watched – because everything in the long, narrow room was watched – by sour-faced Millioni dukes staring down from the walls.

“Put the crates on the floor and leave,” Frederick told his men, who arranged the boxes in a line rather than stacking them. Each box had Giulietta’s arms branded into the lid, she realised with a shock. Bowing to her, then to their master, the soldiers trooped silently outside. It took about a second before they started talking among themselves and Frederick grinned ruefully.

“
Krieghund?
” Giulietta asked.

“Every one of them,” he answered. He’d brought his entire pack to Venice. He’d told her of Wolf Valley, of their runs in the Alpine meadows of the high slopes. She wondered his friends could bear to be caged in a city this crowded.

“You’re going with Marco?”

Frederick raised his eyebrows and she blushed. Of course he was. The treaty Alonzo had signed with Byzantium was as close to a declaration of war as either empire had dared in fifty years. He said, “I’ve written to my father, telling him you know he sent me. I’ve also told him it’s my choice to accompany Marco on this campaign and no fault lies with Venice if I die.”

Lady Giulietta doubted his father would pay much attention. Having lost his elder son off Cyprus in a battle between the Venetian and Mamluk fleets, a letter from Frederick wouldn’t be enough to calm his anger if his remaining son died. All the same, she nodded as if she thought that might work.

“And you?” Frederick asked. “Are you going?”

“What do you think?” Lady Giulietta couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “I’m a woman. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

He glanced at the low neck of her fur-edged dress.

“That’s rude,” she said crossly. When Frederick grinned she knew he was teasing. Her overgown was Alexa’s and twenty years old, cut low at the front when styles had been a little bolder. The undergown was thin white wool.

“So,” Frederick said. “Are you . . .? Going, I mean?”

“I’ve told you . . .”

His smile was knowing.

“What?” demanded Giulietta, feeling her stomach lurch and wondering who had betrayed her. She’d been so careful. How could he possibly know? She was on the edge of pleading for his silence when he told her he knew her. She was planning to board one of the ships and reveal herself to Marco after they’d left Venice.

“Do that,” Frederick said, “and he’ll only put you ashore at Ragusa.”

“I’m a zum Friedland princess.”

“Also Regent. Which is why you need to approach this head-on.” He dropped to a crouch beside a crate and wrestled free its lid, which stuck because it was fitted rather than because it was nailed on. Straw spilled across the floor, filling her study with the faint smell of summer. Digging his hands under the straw packing, Frederick pulled out a white breastplate, scattering more straw around him. “I had to guess the chest size . . .” He held it out to her.

Lady Giulietta took it gingerly.

In Italy the description
white armour
meant armour without decoration. This was truly white. As perfect as if freshly painted but hard to the touch. A slight ridge bisected the breastplate and the steel curved gently rather than sharply towards the sides. He’d guessed the size of her breasts and guessed generously. That made her smile. Since, even after Leo, she doubted they’d trouble an armourer’s skill. She could probably have fitted into a boy’s armour if she tried.

“
Champlevé
,” Frederick said.

He meant the white enamel.
Champlevé
was new, expensive and required talent to do well. Turning the breastplate over, Giulietta realised she’d never seen armour designed for a woman before. Although, of course, there were ballads about wives donning their dead husbands’ armour to defend the family castle or take revenge on his enemies. Frederick was now wrestling with another box.

“Here’s the next bit.” He held it up proudly.

The overlapping white scales of a metal skirt shaped to cover her hips and rise at the front to let her to ride astride like a man. She asked what he imagined she’d wear under it. The answer turned out to be in the third box. “It’s light,” she said, taking the undershirt of mail.

“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.

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 except 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?