The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,64

Tycho wanted to unpick, although why it should matter was another question altogether. Was Alexa heroic or cowardly to make Tycho end her life?

Sinking back against a strangely sloping wall, he pulled up his knees, wrapped his arms around them and rested his chin on his knees as he examined every memory he’d taken from her. She’d been five when her husband came to his throne, a small girl in another country, unaware Venice even existed. She’d been eleven when the marriage was arranged, twelve when it was consummated, fifteen when she had her first child and not from lack of trying. It died, as did the one after, and the one after that, and the one after that.

It took Marco sending his brother on a year-long campaign in the south for a child of hers to live. She was twenty-three and pathetically grateful his subjects no longer had barrenness or dead babies as a reason to hate her. She studied poisons in the years that followed, although she learnt antidotes first. Simple magic after that, deeper magic later.

Hugging his knees, Tycho considered what this new knowledge brought him. Little he hadn’t worked out for himself. Most of Venice’s policy had been made on the fly, actions and reactions, strategies born of disaster, tactics shaped by mistakes. Much of what looked intentional was simply accident, only inevitable in hindsight. After a while, Tycho realised the farmer’s daughter had come to crouch beside him. She froze when he reached for her, but shuffled closer and after a while he felt her settle against his shoulder.

“Sleep now,” Tycho ordered.

But she wanted to say something. Tycho waited while she opened her mouth half a dozen times and swallowed her words before sitting back defeated. Now she was cross with herself. “You can tell me,” he promised. Part of it was cynical: he wanted news of Amelia. A farmer’s daughter, passed from soldier to soldier, would have heard more than those abusing her realised.

She said, “Domovoi.”

Sighing, Tycho asked his question anyway. The black woman was somewhere. The answers drew another sigh and a fresh order that she should sleep. It was an hour before exhaustion took her and she slumped against his shoulder. Another hour and a dead arm before he let her slip sideways, cradling her head and stroking her hair as he might stroke a cat.

As her breathing slowed, and she lost herself to dreamless sleep, he bent for her wrist and bit tenderly, warm blood filling his mouth. He warmed his bones with a single gulp, just enough to clear his mind of Alexa. Having fed, he gave the girl a drop of his blood in return. Not enough to turn her, as Rosalyn turned, but enough to lend her strength and help her heal. A second drop he smoothed across the worst of the bruising on her face, touching her one place else before he woke her. “What’s your name?”

“What is it to you?”

Tycho grinned. That was more like it.

“I’m Tycho,” he said. “I live in Venice with a girl called Giulietta.”

“You’re not Romaioi?” She scowled like someone tricked. “They said that a . . .”

“I saw him when I arrived. He’s older and has an oiled beard. They called him Tiresias and his cloak stinks. It’s fox fur. You didn’t see him?”

She shook her head.

The Romaioi were Byzantine aristocrats who traced their descent from the Romans and ruled the Greeks and Seljuks who peopled an empire that still styled itself as Eastern Roman, for all the Rome-based half of the empire had fallen a thousand years before. “So,” Tycho repeated. “What’s your name?”

Melina was fifteen, and her father had owned the only mill in the valley, which had belonged to his father and his father before that. She sobbed when she mentioned her mother. This told Tycho all he needed to know and he let her cry herself out against his shoulder. She talked and he listened for the rest of that day, her chatter broken only when bodily need won over modesty and Melina vanished to the far side of the dome to pee on bare boards. An hour later, to great embarrassment, she returned there to empty her bowels.

We’re animals, Tycho thought. A day into darkness and already she was returning to her spore. Well, she was an animal, though one with a soul if her priests were to be believed. What he was, was an altogether more difficult question.

The second day was stranger. Scratching from beyond