The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,34

finally she sighed, rolled in against him, tightened her arm across his chest, folded her leg over his hip to hold him in place and said sourly, “Now let me sleep. And you do whatever you call whatever you do . . .” A few minutes later, she spoke again in a voice smoky with darkness and age-old mystery. Wherever Tycho was, she was somewhere else.

“I am the moon . . . I am the mistress . . .”

Her words were a whisper in the silence of the snowscape beyond the fort walls. She was saying a prayer, he realised. A prayer addressed to a goddess unknown to him. He remembered that other night, on the edge of a cold fondamenta in Venice, when she’d talked of the moon, her mistress; and before he could unpick the memories of their first meeting, darkness took him. He woke to find her still in his arms, her body rigid as wood, one hand jabbing his side.

“Wake up.” Her voice was tight.

It couldn’t be the next night already? But the colour of the sky beyond a broken shutter was still just this side of midnight rather than early the next, and he’d lost more than an hour to dreamless sleep. Amelia jabbed her hand at him harder. “All right,” he said.

He was rising on to his elbow when a sword point touched his throat and he opened his eyes. The man with the blade was filthy, crop-haired and half drunk with exhaustion. “What have we got here, boys?” Behind him soldiers clustered closer and one lifted a freshly lit torch that still smoked and spluttered.

“Pretty boys,” the man said. “Pretty boys in bed together.” He looked back at his men, gauging their reaction. “You know what that is, don’t you? It’s a hanging offence.”

17

The day began with sun squinting over the distant sandbar at the mouth of the lagoon and lighting a path so bright across the ice that it lit Venice in a glow that made the buildings golden and the icicles sparkle. Above a balcony at the back of Ca’ Ducale the sparkling icicles hung like glass bars; as if the cold wanted to cage them and the sun was trying to brighten their prison in compensation.

It was, Lady Giulietta admitted, a strange and beautiful sight for all it was unnerving. Seeing the sun made her happier than she’d been in days, though it did little to melt the icicles and nothing at all to melt the snow that covered the small garden at the back of the palace and turned rose beds into ghostly squares. Looking down on to that garden was where Prince Frederick found her after his morning meeting with her Aunt Alexa.

“Your page told me where you were.”

“I don’t have a page.” As she said this, she saw Tycho’s urchin behind Frederick, shuffling his feet and dressed in Millioni scarlet. At Pietro’s stricken look, she added, “Not officially, anyway.” Gods, when had she started caring about the feelings of street children? When she met Tycho probably, that was when most things changed. For the better? Well, life was less interesting back then, also safer and quieter and a lot less strange.

“The view’s better on the other side . . .”

Frederick meant from Ca’ Ducale’s grandest balcony, the one that looked over the herringbone brick of the piazzetta towards a clump of poplars frequented by lovers and thieves and the occasional equestrian needing to tie his horse. Hardly anyone rode in Venice, apart for the Dolphini; and they only did it to show off, and even they weren’t stupid enough to ride in this weather. All the same, when they reached the other balcony Giulietta saw a grey horse tethered to a distant tree.

“Mine,” said Frederick, following her gaze.

“You like riding?”

“Everyone likes riding.”

“I hate it. Everyone sensible hates it.” Her father had ridden. The only time Lady Giulietta remembered him smiling was when he was with his horses. She made herself unbunch her fists and felt sweat trickle from under one arm down her ribs inside her dress to soak her waistband. Giulietta hated that his memory could still do this to her. She also knew Frederick was staring.

“I’m going inside.”

He nodded absent-mindedly and looked at his horse, his head tipped a little to one side. “Have you done much riding?”

Giulietta ignored his question.

“They’re very gentle creatures really.”

She opened her mouth to disagree, reddening when he nodded in sudden understanding. “It’s not the horses you dislike. It’s the