The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini (30 page)

Desdaio had been seated on a bench in the piano nobile, talking about the winter just gone, about the snows that had fallen, the fires that had warmed them. That was how their conversation started.

With snow and fire.

Iacopo was with Atilo, Amelia in bed, monthlies so fierce Desdaio fed her poppy seeds in wine. The cook was making pies for a party, and her scowl said no interruptions.

Tycho was there because Desdaio had summoned him.

She was lonely and cold and scared, her happiness draining day by day as her husband-to-be spent ever more time with his duchess. She didn’t say this. Desdaio didn’t need to. Tycho could feel her sadness. She was wondering if those who shunned her were right. She’d made a mistake.

Her grief was revealed in talk of flowers, and memories of summer barley on the mainland, the counterpoint to her forced brightness. A shadow to the wideness of her smile. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked suddenly.

Tycho shook his head.

Somehow this led to him talking about Bjornvin and the snows he remembered from childhood.

“Bjornvin?” said Desdaio, tasting the name.

Then she shuffled up on her bench and patted the cushion beside her. Frowning when Tycho didn’t immediately abandon his place to join her. He could smell oil in her hair, the orange-blossom scent she often wore, and the gunpowder she was using for toothache. And beneath these a smell that hooked him brutally. So that his jaws throbbed, his throat dried and he couldn’t keep his eyes from her when she adjusted her shawl, her breasts spilling against her gown’s low front.

“Tell me about Afrior,” she demanded.

So he did. Talking fast and desperately. Aware of the tightness behind his eyes and a growing ache in his groin he hunched to hide. He talked of the Skaelingar, of Bjornvin, Lord Eric and Withered Arm. Of the day he took Afrior swimming. He told Desdaio everything he remembered. And in telling her he came face to face with the shame and regret he’d spent so long denying. From which he’d been running so unsuccessfully for what seemed like so long…

Afrior of the golden hair, sweet smile and soft curves was Bjornvin’s most beautiful girl. She was also a slave and the youngest of
Withered Arm’s children. Peering from under her long eyelashes, she’d smiled, her modesty at war with her lips.

To Tycho, her blue eyes held the sky and her smile his heart.

“See,” he said. “I came after all.”

“I thought…” She stopped, not wanting to finish.

People said Afrior was simple. That she had to be to befriend him.

If Lord Eric discovered them together, he’d beat them. Tycho was meant to be guarding goats against the wolves, Afrior grinding rye. But it was nothing to what their mother would do. Withered Arm might be old, but she was vicious with it.

“Come here,” Tycho said, grounding his spear.

She stepped away. “We’re…”

“No,” he said. “
We’re not
.”

No brother could want his sister the way he wanted her.

Wanting Afrior was more important to Tycho than hunting. More important than his mother’s lack of love. More important than Lord Eric’s hatred. And Tycho and Afrior
did
look different. Her impossibly blue eyes against his own’s amber-flecked darkness. Her hair sun-yellow. His wolf-silver, as if he’d been born old. He had sharp cheeks and not a sliver of fat. She was all curves.

For a second Afrior fought him, and then her mouth opened and his tongue touched hers. She was shaking when he pulled back.

“This is wrong.”

“It’s not,” he said.

But her gaze was firm. “We can’t. You know that.” Lord Eric would expect her untouched and know if her maidenhead was gone.

Afrior was thirteen. Maybe fourteen.

Her mother said thirteen, but Lord Eric and his warriors had been away fighting red-painted Skaelingar when she was born. Whispers said she lied to allow her daughter a few months’ extra happiness. Given Lord Eric’s temperament, it was a miracle he hadn’t taken Afrior already.

“He’d know,” Afrior said.

Tycho had tried not to let glee show in his eyes. Until that moment she’d never admitted she wanted to.
He’d know
was close to admitting she might if not for that.

“Let’s swim.”

Her scowl said she suspected a trick. All the same, she followed him through the speckled alder and showy mountain ash, using a path the deer cut back when they still came this way. The herd was gone these days, eaten or too sensible to venture closer. Finding a dip in the river bank hidden by wild roses, he told Afrior to turn her back and stripped off his rags. The day was hot, the sun bright on his skin and the air rich with scents of roses and grass, life’s freshness and tumbling water.

“And you,” he said, not giving her time to argue.

He went into the water fast, fighting the shock that diving into icy currents tightened around his ribs. And Afrior was crouched naked in the shallows when he turned. Lord Eric, his warriors and body slaves were raiding a Skaelingar village. That was what they called it,
raiding.
Mostly it meant killing women while the savages were away fighting each other.

No women meant no babies, no babies meant fewer warriors in years to come. It was more effective to kill those who would deliver the unborn than fight those already living. “Come here,” Tycho said.

“You think I’d trust you?”

There was humour in her voice, and enough truth to make him glance away. So he missed her edging closer.

“You really believe we’re not kin?”

Feeling full breasts brush his chest like the touch of tiny fish, he nodded. “I’m sure,” he said, banishing doubt from his voice. “We don’t even look alike.”

Kissing her deeply, he registered the moment she felt him go hard. The sudden wariness that had her stepping back. So he
used the gap to cup one breast, finding her nipple already erect from the coldness of the river.

She let his hand wander until…

“No,” she said, grabbing his wrist.

They wrestled, until she found his thumb and twisted.

He ignored the pain for as long as he could, then stopped fighting and dipped his head to recognise her victory. She was staring at him. “I thought you were going to let me break it.”

“So did I,” he said.

Afrior’s face softened. Taking his hand, she kissed his thumb, which ached with a dull pain that would last for days. And, having kissed it, she replaced his fingers between her legs. Tycho knew then he would never understand women.

Her insides were more mysterious than he expected. Afrior moaned, her mouth nuzzling as her sounds got louder. When she froze, mid-moan, he thought he’d been too rough. But her eyes watched the bank behind him.

“Stop,” she said.

Turning, he felt piss leave his body before his mind caught up with what he saw. A row of five Skaelingar warriors, bright red in their mixture of oil and ochre. They were naked, flint knives hanging on sinews from their shoulders. Some had sycamore bows already drawn. A sixth man stood between them. A half-Skaelingar slave who’d escaped Bjornvin the year before.

“How interesting,” he said.

The Skaelingar chief snapped out a question, and the ex-slave’s smirk closed down. His reply was humble. Whatever he said, it wasn’t that this was a brother and sister. That would have earned more than the growl he got in return.

“You’re to come here.”

Afrior looked doubtful, but then she was a girl and naked. Looking at her, one man muttered and a second laughed. Both silenced by a snarl from their chief. At his command, they grabbed Afrior the moment she climbed from the water.

Tycho attacked on instinct.

And fell to a blow to his head. Having kicked the air from his lungs, and what was left of the piss from his bladder, the chief stopped when Tycho shat himself. It wasn’t a serious beating. More a warning not to be stupid.

Then another Skaelingar picked him up and turned him to face Afrior, who was struggling with her own captors. When one dug his thumb into her elbow, she started to cry instead.

“I am to translate,” the half-Skaelingar said. “Have you seen what we do to your women? Yes, or no?”

Tycho hadn’t. But he’d heard it whispered.

“We take these,” the translator said.

Their chief gripped Afrior’s breasts, lifting slightly.

“Cutting like this.”

The chief’s hand traced a circle, sloping in so that Tycho understood they cored a pit to take what was behind as well. Afrior might have been an animal for all the attention the man paid her.

“And we take this.”

She screamed when the chief dropped his hand. Tycho didn’t think he hurt her; it was the shock of having him grip her there.

“And, finally, we slit from here to here.” The chief traced from blonde body fur to the arch of Afrior’s ribs. “And pull out what we find.” He stepped back, offended, as she soiled herself.

“You understand?”

Tycho nodded dumbly.

“There is another choice,” the chief said, his words translated through the half-Skaelingar. “Would you like to know it?”

“Yes,” he said. “I would.”

Having glared, to make sure Tycho paid attention, the chief unslung his flint knife, grabbed Afrior between her legs and cut. She jerked in her captor’s hands. And then the chief scattered pale hair at her feet.

“This is all that will happen.”

Tycho looked in disbelief at the man translating, then at the chief whose words these were. He wondered if the ex-slave translated right.

“No harm will come if you do what we ask.” And then the Skaelingar told him what was wanted. Since it seemed the two Viking slaves should not be out together, their chief would not find it strange if one returned alone. Sometime tonight Tycho would unlock Bjornvin’s gate. If it was not unlocked, his lover’s mutilated body would be left at the gates at dawn. If it was, both would have safe passage through Skaelingar territory to the lands beyond.

“The next tribe will kill us.”

“What you should consider,” the chief said, “is that we will not.”

Tycho could have let Afrior die. With her would have died the risk of anyone finding out what had happened. He could have return to his life as Lord Eric’s wolf dog, continued to ignore the hard-faced bitch he called mother.

He was a slave. Lord Eric said
do this
, he did it.

Running faster than the others, jumping higher, hunting swiftly and silently didn’t make him valuable. It simply made him hated. Most days, he got up at daybreak, obeyed orders till nightfall, then slept. Saving Afrior meant betraying everyone else. How could that be right?

He could tell Lord Eric what had happened.

The beating would be terrible but he’d survived others. But Afrior would die and Tycho wanted her. So he killed the gate guard instead. Hitting the man clumsily, clubbing him from behind. When the guard was dead, Tycho lifted the bar to Bjornvin’s gate.

The first thing the Skaelingar chief did on entering Bjornvin was yank back the head of the naked, bound and gagged Viking girl in front of him, spit into her face and rip his blade across her throat.

Afrior bled out before she hit the dirt.

Tycho’s attack would have made him a hero had any lived to sing of it. Grabbing the fallen gate guard’s sword, he flung himself at the chief and plunged the blade in the man’s guts, twisting in his fury.

Then Lord Eric was there, broad-shouldered, more grey than red in his beard. A bloody battle-axe in hand. He believed his slave was guarding Bjornvin’s gate. In three blows Lord Eric killed another three Skaelingar. Then he turned, clapped Tycho on the shoulder. “Wake everyone,” he ordered.

Tycho would have done.

But his mother grabbed him before he reached the great hall. The first thing she told him was that she wasn’t his mother. The next, that he was neither Viking nor Skaelingar, but
Fallen
. She said this through gritted teeth, hatred in her face. “Where’s my daughter?”

“Dead. The Skaelingar killed her.”

Withered Arm slapped him. “
You
killed her. You think I didn’t know?”

Her eyes were hard, her voice cold as winter. Tycho had no doubt she wanted him dead. Would like to kill him herself. Instead, with battle raging, she hurried him to her quarters, and told him to spread the straw from her mattress in a wide circle.

“Do it now,” she ordered.

Outside the slaughter continued.

Individually, Lord Eric’s warriors were better armed. Their swords, chain mail and the helmets brought from Greenland gave them an advantage. But they were outnumbered. The Skaelingar had been closing on the village for years. When Withered Arm returned it was with a flaming brand.

“My mistress told me how to do this before she died. Maybe she knew…” Withered Arm stopped, face bitter. “Oh, she knew all right. She died in birth so you could live. And I knew it for a bad bargain then. Now we die so you… Who knows what? Who will be left to even care?”

Pushing him into the middle of the circle, Withered Arm set
fire to the straw, stepping back as flames crackled around him. And then he felt ice instead of flames, and a rushing like wings, and a vicious wind as if he was falling from a great height. The last thing he saw was the hatred in her face.