46

This time he could clearly see magic rippling along his sword blade. Flecks of fire brightening as he approached his target. Hightown Crow had designed the weapon for one purpose only. Killing krieghund.

“Any last words?” Tycho demanded.

Prince Leopold looked up dumbly.

“I guess not.” Drawing back his sword, Tycho found its balance. “Quite sure about those last…”

“Don’t. Please don’t.”

The words came from behind him.

Tycho froze. He refused to turn. Refused to admit what his senses told him. Instead he watched the wolfthing’s eyes focus beyond him and something human slip back into them. Prince Leopold shook his head very slightly.

“Anything,” the voice promised, closer now. “We’ll give you anything. Leopold has estates. He’ll pay a ransom. Please.”

Kill Friedland. Kill his sister. All Tycho had to do was obey those orders and the Assassini would be his eventually. He didn’t dare turn around.

“I have my orders.”

He could prove himself worthy to be Blade. Assassini killed with no more thought or conscience than a dagger. They existed to be wielded by the duke and his Council. Who they killed was not their concern.

“Stay back,” he warned.

The young woman sobbed as Tycho’s sword reached tipping point. Already the krieghund was changing. Its limbs straightening. Blood running down its face as its jaws retracted. A near-human head would roll across that roof.

He chose a point behind the prince’s skull.

As his sword readied for the kill, a young woman flung herself across Prince Leopold’s naked body. A black scrap of sky detached, falling fast. And Tycho only just managed to pull his blow, shredding the bat instead. Wheeling away, the dying animal tumbled dirtwards.

A tear-stained face looked at Tycho.

Huge eyes widening as she recognised him. He felt unable to breathe, unable to do anything but stare back. He had hunted for over a year to find her and now she had found him. It was the girl from the basilica.

“You won’t kill Leopold?”

Tycho shook his head mutely.

Putting his sword down, he stepped back from temptation. How could he not let the prince go? The sight of Lady Giulietta stole his will to act. He could feel the hairs on her arm as they rippled in the wind. Her scent was a drug far stronger than whatever Iacopo used. A golden heat haze danced around her. He felt awe. An awe so absolute it left him barely able to function.

“Your price?” she whispered.

Touching her lips, he smoothed his fingers down her cheek and rested them lightly on her throat, feeling her pulse flutter. She blushed, and then caught herself. Making herself meet his eyes.

“Me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You.”

Lifting her to her feet, he looked deep into her eyes and saw himself silhouetted against a night sky. Her eyes were blue and he saw in them things no one would see. A thousand specks of light arranged around darkness. A flotilla of ships drawing in on an island.

“In the basilica,” she whispered. “I almost…”

I know.

The memory of her, with a dagger to her breast, remained undimmed. The taste of a single drop of blood from the slightest of wounds had changed him forever. She had locked him to this absurd city.

“Will you let Leopold rise?”

He let her help the German princeling to his feet. If the man attacked Tycho would kill him. But Leopold simply stood there, swaying. His gaze met Tycho’s own, and then Leopold zum Bas Friedland looked at Giulietta and tried to speak. No words came from his ruined throat.

“It’s all right,” she promised.

He was objecting to her offering herself. All three of them knew that from the anguish on his eyes.

Lady Giulietta had a chamber of her own. On the third storey, above the piano nobile and overlooking Rio di San Felice. It was ringed with salt, enough salt to leave a clear trail around the edge of the room. All the passages were lined with salt, even the stairs. Every room in Ca’ Friedland had salt around it.

“Leopold’s idea,” she said. “It’s there to keep me safe.”

“From what?”

“You,” she said, tears filling her eyes.

Shuttered windows led to a tall and narrow balcony with a tiled overhang supported by elegant pillars. Tycho opened the windows slowly, already knowing no enemy waited beyond. In time he would learn to trust his instincts. For now it felt arrogant simply to believe he was right.

Caution made him lock her chamber, sliding its bolts, before checking outside. If you wanted to reach her balcony you would have to climb from the canal, using cracks in the outside walls and the stone ribs of the window arches. Anyone trained by Atilo could do it. That was what made him nervous.

“What are you doing?”

Tycho stopped lugging an old iron chest by its handle. “Blocking that.” He pointed at balcony doors. She nodded mutely, perched on her bed, its curtains down, except the side she’d tied back earlier.

“He won’t try to come in.”

“It’s not Leopold I’m worried about.”

Her eyes went huge in the darkness. She was the girl he’d seen in the basilica. And yet she looked different. As if life had not been kind. “He hurts you?”

She flushed angrily. “Never. Not once.”

His fingers were steady as he slid her undergown over her shoulders, exposing her breasts. They were full, fuller than he expected. Tipped with dark nipples that looked engorged. He lowered her gown further, letting it drop and tugging her hand to show she should step out of it.

Small, but swollen breasts, narrow hips, and flame-red pubic hair.

“What’s that?” A scar crossed her abdomen, and she shivered as he traced its length with one fingertip, halting at the end.

“You can see in the dark?”

He nodded, realised that wasn’t much use, and said, “Yes, but not in the light. Tonight my sight’s clearer than ever.” Why did he tell her that?

“That scar,” he said.

Instead of answering, she slid from his fingers, disappearing behind a curtained arch. When she returned it was with a baby swaddled in bandages so tight it could barely move. Tycho felt constricted just looking at it.

“Yours?”

She nodded defiantly.

“Someone cut a baby out of you?”

“A Saracen surgeon,” she said. “Cut Leo free to save my life. He sewed me up with a tail hair from a white stallion. Said he always knew he’d need it one day.” There was awe in Giulietta’s voice. Women died in childbirth every day. Even a good birth held risks and offered pain.

“It’s Prince Leopold’s child?”

“Leo’s not an it,” she said crossly. “He’s a he. My son… Our son.” She stood naked. Slight hips and soft belly. Milk oozing from her nipples like tears, to trickle along the under slope of her breasts.

“Feed him.”

“Now’s not appropriate.”

She tried to meet Tycho’s eyes, but her room was in near darkness and he had the advantage. She reminded him of the stone mother in Pio Tera dei Assassini, his first night in this hellish city. The one the woman prayed to.

“Lie down,” he told her. “And do it.”

When she continued to stand there, he edged her towards her bed, pushed her on to her side, told her to stay there and took her child, unswaddling it before placing it at her breast. And then he stripped off his doublet, boots and hose. Most of his remaining weapons he put in one corner.

A single stiletto went under her pillow.

Lying behind her, he folded one arm across her stomach and shaped himself around her, feeling the curve of her buttocks, the line of her back and the slope of her shoulders. In the silence that followed he heard her crying.

“Is this so bad?” He knew it for a stupid question even as he asked it. She tensed, with him curled there. Although her child simply guzzled.

“You’re young,” she said eventually.

“You’re younger.”

“Only in years. You know he’ll kill you afterwards?”

“Leopold?”

Lady Giulietta sighed. “My uncle.”

“I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to kill your lover, surely you realise that? Anyway, why would I murder you? How would I even know you were here?”

She opened her mouth to say something, and closed it again.

“Leopold’s krieghund,” Tycho said. “You saw what he became.”

“It’s a curse,” she protested. “You can’t hold being cursed against him. And he told me about it, right at the beginning. He kept nothing back.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You half killed Leopold. You’re naked in my bed. My baby lies defenceless beside me. Do you think I’d risk refusing?”

“I don’t know. Would you?”

“Depends,” she said.

“Why don’t you go home?” It seemed an obvious question. At least, obvious to someone who didn’t have a home. Who’d been born a slave, grown up a slave, and would likely die one now, probably soon.

“This is my home,” Giulietta said. “Well, it was. The Ca’ Ducale is simply where Uncle Alonzo and Aunt Alexa live. Plus, my cousin, of course. Poor Marco, always condemned to being mentioned last.”

“He’s mad?”

“They’re all mad. I could join them. Or leave.”

“You believe that?”

“Oh yes. Who knew being abducted from your abductors was lucky?” There was a mix of bitterness and resignation in Giulietta’s voice. She understood the irony. “Let Leopold go and take the baby. Kill me, if someone has to die. It will be enough for my uncle.”

“Go where?”

She shrugged. “France’s out; he’s not safe there. And the Byzantines would torture him both for every secret he knows.”

“What about if it was all of you?”

“Cathay maybe. In the long term.”

“And in the short term?”

“Cyprus. If Janus will take us.”

“Won’t he mind that you were meant to marry him?”

Lady Giulietta sighed. “Is this nerves? Do you always talk so much in… When forcing yourself on a woman.”

“My first time.”

“Your first rape. How sweet.”

“My first anything.”

“You’re like Leopold,” Giulietta said, turning to face him and using the baby to hide her breasts. “A beast inside a man. And a man inside the beast.”

“No,” Tycho warned her. “I’m nothing like him.”

Wrapping one hand into her hair, he dragged back her head until her throat was exposed.

“You are,” she whispered.

He bit her neck savagely, blood flowing into his mouth, across the baby and on to the sheets. As she screamed, and Prince Leopold began to hammer at the door, Tycho bit deeper, tasting the sweetness her life had to offer.

He’d done what he did. While the baby howled and Prince Leopold beat at the door, Tycho walked Giulietta to the very edge of death’s precipice. The krieghund had known what Tycho’s feeding meant even if Tycho hadn’t.

When Tycho opened the door the German wanted to kill him. Only Leopold was weak and wounded, and Tycho was more alive than he’d ever been. Aware of every movement in the city outside. And there was another reason for Prince Leopold’s fury. One Tycho learnt when the man’s anger ebbed through livid recriminations to tears and guilt. He would rather have died on the roof himself…

Tycho’s kind no longer… Nephilim were…

“Save her,” he demanded.

“How?” Tycho asked.

“Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not.”

Tears rolled down the krieghund’s face, his voice reduced to a grating whisper. “Your blood,” he begged. “Smear it on her wounds. You can have this palace. My gold. Anything you want. Just save her.”

Biting into his wrist—watched by Prince Leopold, whose gaze never left the child at his lover’s breast—Tycho dripped blood into Giulietta’s mouth and on to her ravaged neck, which began to heal, almost as if a saint touched her.

In place of Tycho’s hunger came stillness. The wild fever that the full moon had summoned withdrew like surf on shingle now the storm was over. As Tycho stroked Giulietta’s face, watching her cry wide-eyed and silent on the blood-soaked bed, he knew he loved her.

As did Leopold zum Bas Friedland, lord of the Wolf Brothers and the German emperor’s envoy to Serenissima. Who loved so unwisely both her family and his would kill him without thought if they knew about it.

“Go,” Tycho told her. “Get out of here. Take money, weapons, whatever your lover doesn’t want found.” Tycho stopped, remembering something. “Where’s Leopold’s sister? Atilo told me he lived with his sister.”

“Atilo il Mauros?” Giulietta said. “What has he got to do with this?”

“I killed fifteen of his men.” Prince Leopold’s voice was flat. “About a year and a half ago. In Cannaregio. We were hunting someone and his men ended up hunting us. It was a bloodbath. He killed my men and I killed his.”

“Leopold, that was…”

“Yes,” he said. “We were hunting you.”

“You wanted to kill me?” Lady Giulietta’s voice was a whisper.

“Capture you. And I didn’t know you then.”

“That isn’t an answer.” Shrugging on to an elbow, she realised she was still half naked and wrapped her blanket more tightly around her, completely covering her child. “Throw me that,” she ordered, pointing to a robe.

Both men stood. Prince Leopold fetched the blanket, letting his fingers brush hers as he handed it over. She appeared not to notice. Tomorrow would bring fear, anger and anxiety. For the present she seemed to take almost dying in her stride.

“Tell her why you fought.”

Prince Leopold glared at him. He wanted to say this was none of Tycho’s business. In the end he shrugged. “Atilo heads the Assassini.”

“You’re wrong. That’s Lord Dolphino.”

“No,” Tycho said. “It’s not.”

“Duke Marco had my father assassinated,” Prince Leopold said, his voice heavy.

“My cousin?”

“Your late uncle. When they offered me Venice, how could I refuse? The German emperor’s envoy by day. Leader of the Wolf Brothers by night. We were to terrify you into loving us. Terrify you into signing a treaty of friendship.” Leopold scowled. “I begged for the job.”

“For the chance of capturing me?”

“I didn’t know you,” Prince Leopold said desperately. “When I received news you’d fled Ca’ Ducale I couldn’t believe my luck. Every Wolf Brother in the city was called to track you. When we realised Atilo had Assassini tracking us it was too late to back down. My friends died trying to reach you.”

“To capture me?”

“Or kill you if we couldn’t do that.” Leopold looked ashen in the candlelight. “I’m glad we failed,” he said. “I couldn’t bear…”

“You’d never have met me. You would never have known.”

“No,” he said. “I never would.”