The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,20
serpents spoke. It was the story of Bjornvin’s fall. The last battle of the Far West Warriors, the Viking conquerors of Vineland, whom Tycho remembered as drunken scum. But he’d been their slave, from a people far older, so he was hardly likely to remember them fondly.
The blizzard almost buried the woman approaching the gates of the last Viking settlement in Vineland. She had walked an ice bridge from Asia. Not this winter. Not even the one before.
She was at Bjornvin’s walls before the gate slave saw her. His orders were to admit no one. He would have obeyed, too. But she raised an angelic face framed by black hair. Even at that distance he could see she had amber-flecked eyes.
Without intending, he descended the ladder from the walls, removed the crossbar from the gate and opened it . . .
It was the amber-flecked eyes that made Tycho suspect the woman was his mother. The gate slave who descended the walls was his foster-father. Tycho could remember Bjornvin falling. He was the reason the town fell. He’d not been called Tycho then. He had no idea what he’d been called.
Thorns and wild roses probably grew over its remains; at least he hoped they did. The caribou, foxes and hares would have returned. He doubted even Bjornvin’s red-painted enemy, the Skaelingar, remembered it had existed.
Leo’s nurse and the dead infant lay under grave sheets on marble slabs that looked like cuts of some fatty meat. He could smell corruption in the air, so faint a trace he doubted anyone else could do the same. It was the corruption he’d expect from a corpse an hour or so dead. Alexa must have had them carried down here quickly. The cold had done the rest.
Pulling back the sheet revealed the naked body of a woman in her middle twenties. Her limbs were frozen as if rigor had set and remained rather than eased as it did naturally. Her skin had the sheen of glass and her flesh the translucence of alabaster. But nothing could make pretty the cut that revealed an icy twist of gut. He found what he wanted below her left teat.
A dagger wound. The blow was perfect.
The blade had slid between ribs and ruptured her heart. A blow so neat and a gut wound so brutal? Bending closer, Tycho found a twist of thread in the stab wound and blew on frozen flesh to free it. Red wool from an overgown, bloodied flax from an undergown beneath. The rip to her gut had no threads and its edges were bloodless and too straight. The original blow had bled her out and eventually killed her. The second was for show. She was already mortally wounded before the second cut was made . . .
“That way madness lies.”
“Your highness . . .” Tycho hastily covered the corpse.
Thin as a stick insect and gangly as a spider, Duke Marco stood in the doorway dressed in black. In his hand was a church candle. His doublet could have been Tycho’s own. “P-pretty angel,” Marco said, sounding for a moment like his idiot self. “So alone. So b-bemused. So unlike the rest of us. It was cruel, you k-know. To d-disappear like that. She thought you were g-gone for ever.”
“Lady Giulietta?”
“Who else? She t-told me, you know. About h-how you grew wings of f-fire. And then d-disappeared. She c-cried.” Marco’s mouth twisted in self-mockery. “I c-cried.”
“I had to help Rosalyn . . .”
“Who loved you so f-fiercely she couldn’t bear to s-stay in Venice? You learn so m-much as an idiot. People t-talk in front of you. They s-scheme, p-plan, p-plot and lust. After a while you become invisible. But no, I d-didn’t learn about her f-from g-gossip. Julie t-told me.”
“She gave Rosalyn an estate.”
“I know,” Marco said simply. “I signed the d-decree . . . Just write your name here as neatly as you can. Big letters will do.” His mimicry of his mother was exact. “It’s amazing h-how easy it is to w-write M-MARCO for the thousandth t-time if someone is holding your h-hand to h-help you. Did you love her?”
“No,” Tycho said firmly. “Only Giulietta.”
“Are you s-sure?”
“We were too alike . . .”
Marco nodded at that. “What b-brings you here?”
“This,” Tycho said, lifting the woman’s cloth. He scraped his nail along the edge of her stab wound, collecting blood that had begun to dry before it was frozen. Without allowing himself to hesitate he tasted it.