The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,92

as certain of this as he was that the ice would soon thaw. So he slept his days in the armoury, which was windowless and had a door it was easy to bar, and woke each dusk to find the child sitting by him, looking thoughtful or puzzled, or whatever that strange Millioni expression was meant to be. He fed the infant on scraps collected from the satchels of the wild archers and wondered endlessly whether the goat-heeled creature had lied.

“What do you think?”

Leo didn’t care. Maybe he thought they should wait there for his mother.

“Do you?” Tycho asked. The child burped and Tycho decided that was probably a stay here vote. He could almost hear Giulietta like a single note at the edge of his mind. Her name was written each night across the sky in stars. He had no doubt she was coming. He hardly dared imagine how she’d managed that. “She’ll be here soon.” Something he’d been promising for days.

How would they greet each other? Would she see the guilt in his eyes?

Tycho knew he was behaving like a child and felt shamed without knowing why. Inside his head was a cold darkness that stared back implacably, daring him to venture deeper. He’d thought everyone had that. Pulling a whetstone from his pocket, he drew his sword and dragged the stone along its edge, grinding away the jagged notches put there by his fight with Roderigo. As he did, he tried to still the fears in his head and realised that no whetstone existed to smooth out the notches in his soul . . .

So, you think you have one after all?

A soul? Maybe not, but Giulietta thought he did. He’d arrived in Venice without memories, only to regain fragments when near drowning washed his amnesia away, and Rosalyn, the ragged girl who pulled him from the canal, had been certain it was more than near drowning. He’d been dead when she spotted him floating by the stone steps at Rialto and dragged him ashore. How many times could one person die and still keep a soul?

“All right, all right,” Tycho said.

Leo was grizzling again. Keeping the toddler shit free and fed was a full-time occupation. The child had re-embraced life with a fierce hunger, lungs of steel and the ability to slime food scraps at both ends.

Leo grinned as Tycho picked him up.

“Yeah,” Tycho said. “Your father was a monster, too.” Pulling a chunk of stale bread from his pocket, Tycho tore off a mouthful, bit into an even harder sliver of ewe’s cheese and began to chew. The pulp he spat into his hand he gave the child, who ate it greedily. “I hope you appreciate it,” he said.

The child with Giulietta’s eyes looked up at him.

Tycho doubted he would forget Giulietta. Any more than he’d forget Afrior, the girl who died at the gates of Bjornvin and who he’d thought his sister, with all the bloody complication that caused. First Afrior, now this . . . With a shock, Tycho realised letting Leo go would be almost as hard as parting with Giulietta, and that would be unbearable. Heartbreaking, if he believed for a moment he had any heart left to break.

“Shit,” he said. “You probably won’t even realise I’m gone.”

Or was here at all. That was the brutal bit. To sacrifice and not be remembered, walk away and not be able to say why. Because how could Tycho say what he’d need to say to explain why this was happening . . .

Things change.

Well, he could hardly deny that. And some things, he thought bitterly, remain the same. Dawn was coming and Giulietta so close he could taste her on the last of the night wind. When daylight came he would hide. As he would have to hide every day between now and eternity if the creature from the cave told the truth. Time enough to get rich and powerful, if he could be bothered. For a fleeting moment, he fantasised about being the next Tamburlaine, and building an empire across time as well as distance. An immortal emperor of a never-dying empire . . . An endless succession of empresses beautiful enough to make him forget Giulietta. She’d become that young Italian woman with the red hair whose name he couldn’t remember, except that he’d always remember it. He knew himself too well.

After he carried Leo into the fort and up the guard steps to the battlements, the cold winds sweeping up