The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,49

tell Giulietta about Alexa seeing at a distance, for all that how she did it was still unknown. Her niece would be drawn a little bit closer to him and he would become a little bit more confident around her, which was good.

The boy needed confidence. At least, he needed it if Giulietta was to fall properly in love with him. So far, neither had the wit to realise this was what was happening. Having felt close to Frederick, Giulietta would feel guilty, which would make her angry. Anger would make her realise that if her aunt could see at a distance, she could discover where Tycho was, and Alexa could expect a knock at the door.

22

Somehow he was back in the fort, in the upper chamber, with its wooden bed and rotting fur, under a familiar ceiling, whose stains mapped worlds he didn’t recognise where meltwater dripped through the roof above.

“How did I get here?”

“I carried you.” Amelia turned for the door and Tycho saw a bloody bandage around her shoulder. “Bastard to kill,” she said, seeing his surprise. “And bastard you for being that stupid.” The quietness with which she shut the door was more contemptuous than any slam.

Well, I deserved that.

He thought sombrely of the climb out of the cathedral valley and the wind-swept saddleback of mountain he’d been so impressed with himself for navigating, the ice and ravines and slippery paths between that valley and this, the final tight twist of stairs between the hall below and this chamber, and wondered why he’d ever dared think he was the best the Assassini had to offer.

The thought remained with him.

After a while he realised he owed Amelia an apology. He hadn’t seen beyond her sex and her skin and her past as Lord Atilo’s ex-slave, apprentice and deadly plaything. Maybe that was how Duchess Alexa thought of him? As an exotic toy . . .

“I’m sorry,” he said, when she returned.

Walking to the bed, she felt his brow and pulled down one eyelid to peer into his eye. He knew he was being mocked and probably deserved it. “Are you hungry? she asked finally.

Tycho glanced at her bloody bandage.

“Not even if you ordered me to bleed myself.”

She shut the door with a bang and they both knew that was an improvement on the time before. An hour later she was back, head down and frost whitening her eyebrows. In one hand she held a dead rabbit and in the other a live one; both wore their winter coats. “I wasn’t sure which you’d prefer?”

Her eyes were a challenge.

He had never said he needed blood, nor had he ever suggested he was anything other than human, and yet she’d read correctly his hunger and now brought him both live and dead food. Given the weakness in his limbs it was an easy choice. He pointed at the live one.

“You died,” she said.

“Again . . .?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I died the night I arrived in Venice. Well, I think I did. As Rosalyn dragged me up the water steps I felt my heart start again.”

“Yes,” Amelia said. “That would be a clue.”

She handed him the kicking rabbit and grimaced as he raised it to his mouth, thin blood trickling down his chin as he took away the lake creature’s foul taste. Carcase drained, Tycho offered it back in case she wanted the meat.

“Gross,” she said. Pulling flint and tinder from inside her coat, she produced twigs she’d bundled tight with an old bowstring, and, dropping to a squat, lit a fire right in the middle of the floor and skinned both rabbits by cutting once around the neck and ripping their pelts inside out.

“Some of us,” she said, “are civilised.”

He grinned ruefully, and later ate slivers of roast rabbit that were somewhere between raw and cooked and more pink than they should be. It took him a while to realise she was waiting for him to ask why she’d disobeyed his command to stay where she was. So he asked. She had orders of her own she told him, from Duke Marco. She was to keep Tycho safe, if possible. “Thank you,” he said, which surprised her as much as his apology.

“Were you expecting vodyanoi?”

Tycho paused, the final scraps of rabbit halfway to his mouth. “Was I expecting what?”

“Water demons.”

“That’s what they were?”

“Where you find vodyanoi you find domovoi, house demons.”

And I thought Alonzo was absurd to have his men smash up the ice to make a moat .