Read The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini for Free Online Page B

scream was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Not even falling through the circle of flames in Bjornvin or waking, chained naked to the bulkhead of a ship in the Venetian lagoon, with silver shackles burning his skin, came close.
    I must keep walking.
    In that second he
was
Giulietta and she him. The sound of her anguish echoed inside his head long after it stopped in the hall. He and Giulietta were tied in a way impossible to describe. In a way he wondered if Giulietta even understood. When the screaming was replaced by silence he knew she’d fainted, been drugged or magicked by Alexa into some false peace. By then he was striding towards Misericordia on the city’s northern shore . . .
    The area was well named. A fierce wind blew into his face and the tramped earth beneath his feet felt slick with compacted snow. Ice crust cracked as he walked through street-wide puddles, and his boots were soaked and his feet numb by the time he reached a square of dark water. A monastery stood on the inlet’s far side, its walls black with soot from nearby foundries, which burnt all night with a sombre glow, their fires and furnaces never being allowed to cool. The guard Alexa killed had lived in a narrow tenement between the monastery’s wall and the side of a foundry. His wife, Francesca, lived there still.
    Francesca was Leo’s usual nurse, and, between her falling sick and a new nurse arriving, she’d arranged for Leo to be looked after by the wife of one of the cooks. That Francesca then called a replacement from the mainland worried Alexa. In a city of a hundred thousand, twenty-five out of every thousand died each year and fifty were born; fifteen of which lost their mothers in birth, and twenty-five died within the year . . . The point was that in a city where five thousand gave birth annually there was no shortage of women able to act as wet nurses, nurses and childminders. So why summon one from the mainland?
    Letting himself in through the tenement door nobody had bothered to lock, Tycho headed through a squalid hall greasy with the stink of cheap food and poverty, two smells he remembered well, and headed for a door at the back.
    “Riccardo?” The voice sounded relieved.
    Tycho tapped again. On the door’s far side, Francesca lifted a handle and slid the bolt back in its hoops. She’d been waiting anxiously for her man to return, and, since there’d been no sound of her crossing the room, she must have been waiting on the far side of the door. Tycho felt sick at what that told him. And even sicker at what he would do. Having shot the bolt, she began to open the door.
    Tycho was inside before she realised, his hand over her mouth as he positioned himself behind her. At most, she’d have seen a white-clad figure flow ghostlike through the half-darkness. Blowing out the cheap candle she clutched, he felt bitter smoke fill his nostrils. When she stopped struggling, he took his hand from her mouth. “You know why I’m here.”
    “Riccardo?”
    “Is dead.”
    “
No
. . .”
    “You know it’s true.”
    She did, too. It was in the slump of her shoulders and sag of her body. For a moment she tensed, glancing longingly at the door, then hope leached from her. “Will they torture me first?”
    Had she been able to write she could have made no clearer confession. Although Tycho was uncertain what she confessed to. That she would help murder the baby she nursed felt wrong. “It will be a quick death.”
    “Thank you . . .”
    Such resignation. “How could you agree?”
    Francesca opened her mouth and shut it. She had typically Venetian features, wide-cheeked and dark-eyed, with a strong nose. In another life the woman might have been pretty; in this she was cheaply dressed and heavy dugged from years of giving milk to other people’s children. Her husband had died quickly. He had no way of knowing his wife would be offered that luxury and had risked her life anyway. “You didn’t think you’d be