The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,50

. . It looked as if the Regent’s defences were better than Duchess Alexa had suspected. Somewhere between that thought and the stringy shreds of rabbit meat stuck in his back teeth, Tycho came up with a plan no more absurd than any other and substantially better than throwing himself in a lake full of water demons. As he picked his teeth with a splinter of wood and licked grease from his fingers, he ran through the plan looking for flaws before explaining what he had in mind.

“Why don’t we just kill him?” Amelia asked.

“No, we have to get inside the castle,” he started to say, then remembered she didn’t know Alonzo had Leo. Amelia thought they were there simply to kill the man. “Alexa told me to . . .”

Amelia’s face tightened. She had orders from Marco he hadn’t known about. Now she understood that he, in turn, had orders that had been kept from her. Why would either of them imagine it might be different? Tycho returned to his plan. It was the rabbits that gave him his idea. That, and knowing Alonzo’s passion for hunting. All the joy of blood and battle with none of the danger. The Regent would undoubtedly ride out early and return late, and the winter days meant Tycho would have an hour at each end to hunt the man down. Boredom would drive Alonzo from his cathedral and darkness would deliver him to Amelia and Tycho. All they had to do was watch and wait. “He’ll be better tempered if the hunt is good,” Amelia said.

“And worse if the day goes badly.”

“Then we’d better make sure it begins and ends well.”

They ran the rocky spine between valleys, the wind less cruel this time, and found a cave high above the village, with the Red Cathedral beyond. Tycho left her there, going to the edge of a small cliff to keep watch. On their second day of running the ridge and keeping watch, torches flared far below and a party of horsemen began to gather in front of the cathedral. It was more luck than he deserved.

A few moments later, when he went to check on Amelia she was already tightly wrapped in her cloak and fast asleep at the back of the cave. He scratched the sign for prey sighted into the rock and returned to his watch; the beginning and end of the day were his and the daylight hours hers.

Finding a five-point stag in a high valley, Tycho harried the beast through the narrow gap of a pass and down to where firs rose at the start of the treeline. Their trunks were twisted and old, half banked with snow and awkwardly angled from a life fighting the winds. They would survive the winter, though, which was more than the stag would have done. Its ribs jutted like bare twigs and its hips were hollows of starvation. Alonzo would still be grateful for the kill, and his men grateful for whatever meat his butchers extracted from its carcase. A snow rabbit crossed his path and Tycho let it go.

Wild pigs were in the lower valley, huddled in the dark spaces beneath the forest, where the snow had settled on top of the trees to create a hidden world where pine needles stank of urine as his feet kicked rotting scabs from the forest floor. He left the sows where he found them, circling an elderly one-tusked boar. Alonzo’s hounds would scent them easily enough.

In a narrow cave covered with more paintings of animals and stick-like hunters he found a huge bear sleeping on a litter of dry bracken it had collected for bedding. Rotting meat decayed in one corner, and white bones said the bear’s ancestors had used the cave for generations. Tycho left the great beast sleeping.

A wolf provided better prey. Tycho saw it climbing towards the pass he’d used earlier, and it saw him and began to hunt, calling for its brothers with a triumphant howl he hoped the Regent would also hear. The pack chased Tycho down a gully, certain they could tire him, until he brought them to where Alonzo’s men would ride. He left them in a burst of speed, rocks slippery under his feet as he ran a line of boulders tossed down by giants in older times. With luck, frustration would make the wolves reckless enough to risk attacking one of Alonzo’s outriders, and the Regent would have outrage to add to whatever