The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini (30 page)

“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 his 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.

Then she was hugging Leo, her steel-clad arms tight around the child and her face pushed to his and she was sobbing as if her heart was broken, although Tycho knew it was mended.

“Thank you,” she said. Leopold nodded and Tycho’s hackles rose.

Who was he to join in Lady Giulietta’s thanks?

“R-ride with me,” Marco ordered.

“Your highness, I have no mount.”

The duke clapped his hands and a bearded groom cantered forward with one of Marco’s spare mounts. The animal was already saddled.

“I’m bad at riding, highness.”

“You’re afraid?”

“Only of appearing a fool in front of Giulietta.”

Marco smiled sympathetically. “I”m rubbish at r-riding,” he confided. “It’s best to let the animal do all the w-work and simply p-pretend you know what you’re d-doing without doing anything. Much like being a prince . . . Come, we’ll both p-pretend we know what we’re d-doing. D-don”t worry,” he added. “I know we need to g-get you under cover before the sun r-rises.”

She didn’t see Tycho that evening or the next. Lady Giulietta wasn’t sure if he was avoiding her or she was avoiding him. Even Frederick seemed unsettled by the blackness of her mood. She clung to Leo, afraid that he’d forgotten her. And when he grinned and said mama, she cried. But still the darkness and the doubts remained, and within an hour she was examining every inch of his body, afraid he’d taken a fever or been hurt in some way. But all he did was gurgle and grin and regard her search as a great game, and by the end she had to admit there wasn’t a single bruise.

Tycho had looked after him well.

The day after that Marco’s army negotiated the last of the passes and Giulietta stood beside her cousin looking down at the valley with the Red Cathedral in the middle of its lake. A cathedral, a separate bell tower and a squat hall. The buildings were stranger than she expected, more exotic. They didn’t look Christian to her at all. The lake itself was long and thin, and the village small and mean. She wanted to be out of the wind as much as the others, but the shiver that caught her had nothing to do with the cold.

He’s down there . . .
She gave him a name, cross with herself for being a coward,
Uncle Alonzo.
Although
Alonzo di Millioni
would do. She hated that they belonged to the same family. That someone in her family could do what he’d done to her . . . Had her inseminated, made her bear his child and then stolen the baby from her.
Not your fault
, she thought, looking at Leo clutched in her arms. Never your fault . . .

“We should m-move.”

Looking up, she realised the entire army was waiting for her. Well, Marco was, and that was the same. “Sorry.”

“You should t-talk to T-Tycho.”

“
Marco
.”

“The l-longer you p-put it off the w-worse it will get.”

Remounting, Marco waited for her to do the same, and together they rode on with Frederick following them like an unhappy shadow and Tycho hidden wherever her cousin kept him hidden during the day. They rode down the valley and into the village, and the villagers were too cowed by the cold and their hunger to do more than come out of their houses and stare. The Red Crucifers, then Alonzo, then Marco . . . She doubted it made any difference to them who was ruining their lives.

Marco set up his camp beside the village on the fan-shaped alluvial plain formed by dirt and grit brought down from the high mountains around them. It was hardscrabble ground that jutted into a narrow and unforgiving lake. Their surroundings suffered the villagers to exist but treated them too harshly to encourage them to increase in number. The rows of graves with rotting wooden headboards and the occasional rusting iron one were proof of that.

The duke apologised to the villagers for what was about to happen, and then he had his soldiers raid their larders, search their straw for hidden food or weapons, round up what was left of their herds, slaughter the few remaining chickens and rip down their log houses for kindling, firewood and logs that could be used to make palisades. The newly homeless he conscripted into his army, housing them under canvas or blankets like the rest of his men.

Hunters became pathfinders or archers, farm labourers dug latrines, the blacksmith joined the armourers, and the wise women were ordered to help with the sick. The rest were given simple spears, shown how to hold them and told to die well. Since they’d lived on the edge of hunger their entire lives, and those lives had been spent on the shore of a bleak upland lake in the shadow of a rotting wooden cathedral, this surprised them not at all.

“Do you think he has men watching? Giulietta asked.

“Obviously,” Frederick said. Seeing her scowl, he shrugged apologetically. “I mean, wouldn’t you?” He jerked his chin towards the building rising from the ice at the far end of the lake. Walls of rock rose high behind it and to both sides. The marble-white ice provided the only approach. The village was the gateway.

It would be a strange siege. The route from the coast was too rugged and Marco had marched the column too fast for them to drag catapults or timber to build siege towers or the supplies needed to dig tunnels. But why would he need them? He already knew no huge stone walls stood in their way. The cathedral was made from old staves that should burn easily if he could get close enough. His siege engines were individual archers, flaming arrows were what he intended to use to bring the walls down. The ice, he told his officers, was an added bonus. All that water frozen solid so it couldn’t be used to put out the fires.

He intended to follow Julius Caesar’s siege of Alesia, although obviously Marco had far fewer men and he didn’t need to build a
circumvallation
around the cathedral, since the mountains created their own containing wall, nor did he need to dig a ditch round the cathedral and fill it was water, since Alonzo had thoughtfully done that for him with the makeshift moat, whose ice he had broken each day. Marco would, however, be using the other parts of Caesar’s original plan.

Frederick said, “Captain Weimer is horrified.”