The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,98
her fingers into his hair to hold him still. Her next kiss was deeper. When he put his hand to her breast, she smiled and moved her elbow to allow him room. Her breasts were fuller than when they first met.
“Gently,” she protested.
Grinning, he dipped his head and suckled her, her fingers twisting into his hair as she pulled him against her. They slid down on to the cot and he let Giulietta shift him so her mouth could reach his as she folded her leg over his and tightened, grinding herself into him. She came with a gasp and a sob-like laugh.
They lay like that for a while until the sound of her breath was replaced by noise from the camp outside. Sentries changing watch, crackling fires, low talk and nervous laughter. Men had been sharpening swords all evening, checking their armour and quietly saying their prayers. Horses lamed crossing the high pass, and there had been several, had been slaughtered, butchered and eaten. What little wine had been carried was drunk.
The silence beyond the tent was the silence of an army gathering its breath before battle. Frost crackled underfoot and boots broke ice over a puddle a hundred paces away. Someone was circling her tent nervously. Tycho could hear it over the camp’s heartbeat and the restless waiting of the men around him. Marco was the first Millioni duke to take himself to war and Tycho hoped victory would be his reward. He prayed for it.
He, Tycho, who believed in no gods . . . Not even the goat-heeled fool who’d stolen his future, prayed to Giulietta’s god – in whom he definitely didn’t believe – to give victory to the cousin of this girl who was leaving him, whether she knew it or not. Maybe she was expecting him to rage at how things had changed and he might have done if not for the price the creature in the cave extracted for Leo’s life. He would have raged and killed and fought. He would have used the bonds between them. Bonds that would always exist unless he . . . Rolling out of bed, he reached for his leather pocket and scrabbled inside. “Still there,” he said, his fingers closing around a scrap of paper in the bottom. “Thought I’d lost something.”
“What?” Lady Giulietta demanded.
“Peacock’s eyes.”
She sighed but still moved over when he returned to the cot, and settled her face against his fingers when he reached for her cheek. “I missed you,” she said. “I really missed you. You have no idea how badly.”
“And then you discovered you could do without me.”
She froze and Tycho knew she was waiting for him to say more. Only, what else was there? That was the truth. He’d gone, and she’d realised she could live without him. Trying to kill herself was about losing Leo. She’d been able to bear Tycho’s absence and what she believed was his betrayal. It was hearing Alonzo had claimed Leo that tipped her over the edge. Well, so Marco said.
“I died . . .” Her voice told him how hard she found that to say.
“You nearly died. If you’d died you wouldn’t be here and Leo wouldn’t be asleep beside you.”
“I took Aunt Alexa’s fiercest poison.”
“Marco says it was probably designed to paralyse so thoroughly everyone thinks the victim is dead. Useful for kidnapping, he reckons. There’s a fish in China. You cut out the liver . . .”
“How does he know that?”
“He reads,” Tycho said. “He reads a lot.”
Giulietta obviously decided this was a version of the truth she could accept. Her muscles relaxed and her breathing steadied and she snuffled her face into her pillow as he stroked her hair, and kept stroking until he was certain she was asleep. Then he stood, buckled on his daggers and slung his sword over his shoulder without bothering to buckle his baldric.
“Maybe we’ll talk later,” he told her sleeping form. “Maybe not. Who knows how the battle will go? But you should know I love you.”
It was so much easier to say when she wasn’t awake to hear it.
“Things change – but that remains.”
He smelt the oil in her unwashed hair when he bent to kiss her. Inhaling the salt warmth of her body and seeing what he was giving up in the curves of a sleepy smile. What did you expect? A throne and the girl you loved? Tomorrow would be hard for everyone. Difficult, bloody and complex.