In the morning, it felt like my right thigh bone had been replaced with a jagged piece of glass. And let’s not even talk about my knee. My leg always dragged a little, even on my best days, but that Quatrième it wasn’t like a leg at all, but a ball-and-chain or something. I told myself to be grateful for small favors—it was at least able to hold me up. Sort of.
Both Felix and Gideon were in the sitting room. My first step away from the support of the door damn near ended with me flat on my face, and I heard Gideon’s breath catch. Felix started to get up, but I said, “Don’t,” between my teeth, and he sat back down. I lurched across to the table, where I could lean on one of the chairs. I got my hands on the chair back, and my fingers dug in like they thought somebody was going to try and take it away from me.
“You look dreadful,” Felix said, trying to sound like he was talking about the weather. “Are you going to be able to stand all through court?”
“No,” I said, the truth getting out before I had a chance to snatch it back. “I mean, maybe, if I can—”
“Gideon says you should be in bed,” Felix said.
“Be better if I keep moving.”
“Well, a fine picture you’re going to make dragging that chair everywhere you go.”
I said back the same way, “Oh fuck off, would you?” And he actually gave me about a quarter of a grin.
He looked over at Gideon, listening. “Gideon says that although he’s not keen on helping you kill yourself, it occurs to him that we might ask Rinaldo if you could borrow a walking stick. Would that work?”
Powers and saints. Right back to the Gardens of Nephele and hobbling in circles in the Three Serenities Garden. But better that than stuck in bed. “Yeah,” I said. “Anything up to Rinaldo’s weight should do me just fine.” Some days Rinaldo could heave his bulk around on his own, but some days he couldn’t. Rheumatics, he said.
“We’ll send Rollo with a note,” Felix said, making a long arm for the inkstand on the other side of the table. “Now sit down before you pass out on the floor.”
“Yessir,” I said, but I couldn’t even make it snarky.
While Felix wrote his note, I sat and made my breathing even out, and then I looked up at Gideon and said, “Sorry.”
His eyebrows went up.
“For the things I said.” I could feel myself going as red as a tomato. “You know. On Deuxième.”
He shook his head and made a kind of gentle pushing-away gesture, like he was saying it didn’t matter.
“I kind of think it does matter.” I wished like fuck Felix wasn’t sitting there, but I couldn’t put it off no longer. “And I’m sorry.”
Gideon looked at me a moment, and then he smiled, warm as sunlight, and poured me a cup of tea. Which I figured meant I was forgiven.
If Rollo minded playing messenger boy, he didn’t show it, and he was back fast enough that we weren’t even running later than usual. The stick he brought was almost as thick around as Gideon’s wrist, made of some wood I didn’t know, knotty and dark, the color of really strong tea. The foot was iron-shod, and the grip was carved with a smiling animal’s head—a dog or a bear or something, broad and ugly, but friendly, too.
There was a note. Felix ran an eye down it, more or less on our way out the door. “Rinaldo says it was imported from Imar Elchevar, though he suspects it was made even farther south. The beast is Jashuki, an Imaran guardian spirit. He says you should consider the cane a gift.”
“Nice of him.”
He gave me a funny look. “Rinaldo isn’t about to forget …” And then I could see him decide to drop it. “Oh never mind. Come on.”
Whatever he’d been going to say, I didn’t want to know about it. I just followed him and let Jashuki hold me up.
When I reached the Empyrean that morning, around ten o’clock, there was a letter waiting in my pigeonhole. I reflexively recognized both paper and wax as the highest-possible quality, and then identified the seal: the tower and sunburst of the Teverii. The letter was addressed to me in a jagged masculine scrawl that would have shamed any secretary in Marathat into ritual suicide.
I broke the seal. Looked first at the signature. Stephen Teverius. Then read the letter, which was an invitation to dinner. He would send a page at noon for my reply.
It was nice of him, I supposed, to pretend there was any doubt about my answer.
Inevitably, hard on the heels of Stephen’s panting but intrigued page came Vulpes.
“Quite a coup, Cressida,” he said when we were immured in my dressing room. “My sources in the Mirador say this is the first time he’s dined twice with any woman but his sister since his wife died.”
“He’s just trying to annoy the people who want to find him a wife,” I said.
“Lover of the Lord Protector is nothing to scoff at.”
“No, lieutenant.”
“But that’s your lookout, Cressida my dear,” he said with a peculiar kind of gaiety. “All I care about is how much information you can get out of him.”
“What kind of information?”
He raised his eyebrows at me.
“I’m serious. What topics are you interested in? His childhood illnesses or his foreign policy?”
“I’m interested in what the Lord Protector really thinks about wizards, especially the various, er, factions of current and former Eusebians. I am interested in his relations with his family and particularly with Robert of Hermione. I am interested in what his real opinion of the Bastion is, and if he believes General Parsifal’s offer. I am interested in how he envisages the Mirador’s future. And I want to know more about what he thinks about Felix Harrowgate. Messire Harrowgate is very important to the structure of the Mirador’s magic, and it is well known that he does not get along with the Lord Protector. I find the discontinuity … provocative.”
Of course you do, I thought. Anyone wanting to cause trouble in the Mirador should be fascinated by Felix. But if Vulpes didn’t think I was smart enough to figure that out on my own, that was just fine. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“There’s no great hurry,” he said—a thing Louis Goliath would never have admitted to any of his spies. “All we’re doing now is collecting information.”
He left then, and I sat alone for a long time with the implications of his statement. Sat and pondered until Jean-Soleil came pounding on my door to ask, had I died or could we, for the love of all the saints and powers, please start rehearsal? I went out, but I was still wondering: if all we were doing now was collecting information, what exactly was it that we were going to be doing later?
Felix said under his breath, just before it was our turn through the big bronze doors, “Don’t forget it’s Lundy.”
Which of course I had.
Lundy was Felix’s day to teach, which had turned out in a funny way to be almost the most important thing in his schedule. He’d joke about bailing on Curia meetings, although he never did, but he didn’t miss Lundy afternoons. Except for last Lundy, when Lord Stephen got in the way.
I’d just about swallowed my teeth, back at the beginning of winter, when Lord Blaise came and asked Felix if he wanted to teach. There’d been a funny kind of silence, and then Felix had said, “I won’t take apprentices.” His eyes were glass-hard, and I knew he was thinking about Strych.
“You needn’t if you don’t want to,” Lord Blaise said. He was in his tenth septad, a nice old man with long white mustaches. “We have many young wizards who aren’t ready for an apprenticeship, and they are my principal concern.”
“What is it that you want?” Felix said.
“I am trying to find six or seven wizards who would take an afternoon a week to talk to these students, to help prepare them to become someone’s apprentice. I naturally had hoped that the wizards who came to teach might be willing to take on the students as they became ready, but if you don’t wish it, I respect that. I will make it clear to them that you are not to be asked.”
I didn’t think they’d be brave enough to ask anyway, but I kept that to myself.
Felix had asked for a day to think about it, but he’d agreed. I remembered now what he’d said about Iosephinus Pompey, who’d taught him, and wondered if that had anything to do with it. And it’d turned out, after a couple decads for him to find his range, that he was a better teacher than anybody, including him and Lord Blaise, had expected.
The kids were scared of him, but I think they liked him, too. There were ten of them, four girls and six guys, and they were kids from the Lower City and the bourgeois districts in the west and from the outlying villages—kids who were lucky if they’d made it through grammar school. Which is more education than I got, but it ain’t much if you’re setting out to be a hocus.
Felix said Lord Blaise was right to be worried about them, that the system in the Mirador favored kids from rich families or noble families, or kids who’d made a long journey. Kids who came from Monspulchra or farther west, or who came up from the islands—those kids got all kinds of attention, lots of hocuses looking out for them and helping them. It was the local kids that nobody paid much mind to. A lot of them never got their rings and tattoos, just dropped out to go back down the city and learn from the hocuses in Candlewick Mews and Sunslave. And I knew if they learned from the wrong people down there, they’d probably get hunted to death by the same hocuses in the Mirador who hadn’t bothered to help them in the first place. But I didn’t say that, either. After the fight me and Felix had had in Nivôse, we didn’t talk about the witch-hunts no more.
I went with him when he taught. I’d tried suggesting maybe that wasn’t necessary, but he said, “No, if they’re going to be wizards in the Mirador, they’re going to have to get used to you sooner or later. You can just sit in the back, and no one will mind.”
Well, that was a lie. The kids weren’t mean or nothing—or at least they weren’t stupid enough to lip off to Felix Harrowgate—but they knew I was there, and I’d catch them glancing back at me every so often when they thought neither me nor Felix would notice. But that did get better as time went on. Felix ignored me completely while he was teaching, and I think that helped. And I didn’t mind sitting back there and watching. Got some thinking done when I needed to. Learned a little bit about magic, some afternoons, although mostly the sort of stuff that made me glad I was annemer.
That afternoon, I got myself as comfortable as I could—which wasn’t very, if anybody was wondering—and tried to put my mind to work on Jenny Dawnlight and her corpse in Laceshroud.
It wouldn’t stick.
I kept getting hung up on something Felix had said two nights ago. Well; not just one thing. Between us we’d pretty much said everything and then some and most particularly the things we shouldn’t’ve. But he’d been shouting about how come I’d had to go down to Britomart in the first place and Kolkhis didn’t seem to have to get into the Mirador when she wanted to talk to people, and he’d said something about “your little musician friend.” I’d gone after it, because even as fucking mad as I was, I knew I had to keep him away from what I’d gone to talk to Keeper about. And it turned out that Cardenio’d come to see him when Strych got me, and he’d gotten in because Keeper sent him to Hugo.
And powers and saints, that didn’t make no fucking sense. I mean, at the time, I’d been screaming at Felix about Cardenio and him not telling me, and he’d been screaming back about how I wouldn’t listen to anything he said anyway if it was about Strych and how was he supposed to know this was different, and anyway I’d kind of lost track of Hugo.
But now—what the fuck did Hugo have to do with Keeper? It occurred to me that maybe me showing up on his doorstep had made him twitchy for some other reason than just, well, me. If Keeper had some kind of hold over him … that was nasty shit, and no mistake. And it made me nervous, because it would be just like Keeper to get me all focused on Septimus Wilder while my real problem was Hugo Chandler sneaking up behind me. Or, not Hugo himself, because he wouldn’t have the guts, but whatever it was he’d been all twitchy about.
And that wasn’t no nice thought.
Your own stupid fault, Milly-Fox. Traipsing down to Britomart like that. And all for what? A dead girl. She ain’t gonna get no less dead just for you finding out who got her killed. It’s too fucking late for that. It was too fucking late for that before you even knew she was dead. It was too fucking late for that the moment you let her walk out without—
I dropped my cane.
Felix said, “A little louder next time, Mildmay, if you please. You almost woke up Calvert.”
The kids laughed, Calvert with them, though kind of sheepishly. He was a soft, clumsy boy, a shopkeeper’s son from Dimcreed, and he had a crush on Felix so heavy I could feel it clear across the room. Felix didn’t like him—Calvert did sleep in class, sometimes, and it made me wonder what he was doing with his nights—and though Felix did his best not to pick on Calvert, he didn’t always succeed.
“Sorry,” I said. Felix waved a hand—no big deal—and went on with whatever he was saying. Something about the history of the Mirador’s magic. I set myself to listen to it, and listen hard. It was better than thinking.
“What was the matter with you?” Felix said when he’d got free of the kids.
“Just clumsy,” I said.
“Yes, but you aren’t. Clumsy, I mean. Is your leg cramping again?”
“No,” I said. “I just ain’t used to having a cane to fiddle with, okay?”
“All right,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.
It was about the tenth hour of the day. The reason Felix always gave people when they asked why he’d fallen in with Lord Blaise’s nutcase idea was that it gave him half an afternoon free. He said now, letting me off the hook, “I’m going off to the Fevrier Archive, but I know you’ll be bored to tears. If you want to go back to the suite and sleep, I don’t mind.”
“Thanks,” I said, although I wasn’t going to be alone with my thoughts if I could help it. “See you for dinner?”
“Of course,” he said. As he walked off, his stride lengthened, since he didn’t have to let me keep up with him.
I waited a second—you could never count on Felix not to change his mind—and then headed off in a different direction, toward the Protectorate Guard’s barracks. Because I did want to know if Hugo was wandering down the city these days, and the Guard would know.
They put a guard on duty at their barracks, one of the guys too old and crippled for regular duty. He had a chair, along of having only one leg, and his sword was down on the floor, but you’d have to be awful dumb to think that made him an easy target. Him and the guy on night shift, who was three septads younger but only had one arm, were the toughest bastards I’d ever met. I wasn’t real sure they were necessary—I mean, who’d be nuts enough to attack the Guard in the middle of the fucking Mirador?—but I was sure that if they ever were necessary, the guys they were up against were going to be sorry.
The day guy’s name was Lemuel. The night guy was Bruno. They were both glad to shoot the shit with me if I happened to stop by. Lemuel was about the only person in the Mirador who’d actually asked me, point-blank and face-to-face, what this binding-by-forms crap was. I’d told him as best I could, going light on the magic shit and leaving out how I felt about Felix, and after that the guards had gotten friendlier. They were used to the idea of being bodyguards to hocuses.
So Lemuel said, “Hey, Mildmay. What happened to your face?”
“Hey, Lemuel,” I said. “Got in a fight. Josiah around?”
“He might be. Whatcha want him for?”
“Gossip.”
“Well, if that’s what you want, why don’t you go on in? If’n you don’t find Josiah, there’ll be somebody else to make you happy.” He snorted. “Those boys gossip like a bunch of damn old maids.”
“Thanks, Lemuel.” I limped into the barracks. I felt conspicuous as hell leaning on my stick and with my left eye like a rainbow, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of other choices lined up.
Four guys near the door, playing Long Tiffany, invited me to join the game. I told ’em, thanks, but I had better uses for my money.
“What’re you doing here?” said another man, who was polishing his boots on the other side of the room. “Running errands for that molly hocus whore of yours?”
I looked at him. His name was Thibaud, and I already knew he didn’t like me. He’d been in charge of the guys assigned to figure out Cerberus Cresset’s murder, and he was still pissed at not having caught me—and even more pissed at the fact that now he knew who I was he couldn’t do nothing about it. There was a whole group of guys who hated me and Felix both—one of ’em, Esmond, hated Felix nearly as much as Robert did, but nobody would tell me why.
“Ain’t none of your business if I am,” I said.
“Thibaud, would you give it a rest?” said the oldest of the card players, a guy named Cleo who would have made two of anybody in the room. “Whatcha after, Fox?”
“Who ya gonna murder this time?” said one of Thibaud’s friends.
“You if you don’t shut up.” I said to Cleo, “I was just looking for Josiah.”
“Has Jo caught Lord Felix’s fancy now?” Thibaud again.
“Powers, Thibaud, will you shut your fucking trap?” Cleo said. He bellowed, “Hey, Jo, guy here for you!”
“I don’t see why you’re getting on my case, Cleo,” Thibaud said, going all injured. “I ain’t murdered nobody, and I ain’t catching flies for no moll, neither.”
“Well, very fucking good for you,” Cleo said. “All I’m looking for is some peace, and I can’t get that with you running your mouth. Jo! Move your ass, would you?”
Josiah came through the door at the back of the room, just as Thibaud said, “I ain’t the one came walking in here like he owns the place.”
“Shut up, Thibaud,” Josiah said on his way past. “C’mon, Mildmay. We can go to the Pav.”
The Pav’s practically in earshot of the barracks. It’s a big open room with this kind of lacy stonework like an indoor gazebo or something. It’s supposed to be haunted so nobody uses it much.
“You okay?” Josiah said when we’d got settled. “I mean, your face and all, and I ain’t seen you with a cane before.”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, although it felt like a lie.
“I’m sorry about Thibaud.”
“It ain’t your fault he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t got to be friends with everybody in the Mirador.”
“Thibaud’s just mad ’cause you beat him,” Josiah said. “He thought he was gonna make it to captain on the strength of finding the guy who waxed Lord Cerberus. But he didn’t find you, and he didn’t get promoted. That’s what’s up his ass.”
“Powers, I’m sorry I got in the way of his career,” I said, and we both laughed. Neither of us said nothing about Felix. “Josiah, do you know anything about Hugo Chandler?”
“The molly musician, right? The one that looks like a rabbit?”
It occurred to me for a second how awful it would be to go through life where the first thing anybody remembered about you was that you looked like a rabbit. “Yeah.”
“What about him?”
“I dunno. Anything. Who’s he hang out with? What’s he do with his spare time? Does he leave the Mirador?”
“He crossed you about something?”
“Nah.” I thought for a moment about what it was okay to tell Josiah. “I used to know him, in Dragonteeth. I’m worried about him is all, if he’s, you know, getting along okay.”
“You could ask him,” Josiah said.
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
“Oh, like that, is it? He don’t get in trouble, I can tell you that much. We gotta go ’round to the Mesmerine couple times a dec—I mean, about once a week—but it ain’t never about Mr. Chandler. I think he’s got a pretty steady thing going with one of the other musicians, so he ain’t out getting drunk or chasing the serving girls or nothing like that. He’s got family in Dragonteeth, but I don’t think he even goes out to see ’em—just sends ’em money.”
The Protectorate Guard knows just about everything that happens in the Mirador. They have to. It’s part of their job. If Josiah said Hugo wasn’t leaving the Mirador, he wasn’t, because the one thing I was sure of was a rabbit like Hugo wasn’t ducking down into the Arcane to get past the gates.
“And nobody’s got a down on him?” I said. “None of the flashies?”
“I don’t think nobody’s noticed him. And the flashies that like music all like him just fine.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. Who’s his musician?”
“Boy from Skaar. Name of Axel. Tall, skinny, blond. He’s pretty new. He ain’t got in trouble, neither, so that’s about all I know, but Chilver says he’s too pretty for his own good.”
“Well, I ain’t trying to get his complete life story out of you. Just wondered.”
“So long as you ain’t gonna go causing trouble where there ain’t none, you can wonder all you like.”
“Nah, I don’t want Hugo in trouble. I just wanted to be sure he wasn’t in trouble.”
“Not with us,” Josiah said.
Corinna and I raided the costumes again, and came up with a dark brown dress, patterned all over in a design of vines and leaves that looked black unless the light caught it at a particular angle, when it showed up a sort of rich puce color. “It suits you,” Corinna said, and I saw the truth of that in the eyes of the guards at Chevalgate, and the eyes of the pudgy blotch-faced page who led me to Lord Stephen’s apartments.
Lord Stephen rose when I entered his sitting room and, after a moment’s contemplation, said, “You are exquisite.”
I wished I could fake a blush.
I asked him early on, over the soup, about his family, some inanity about had they been close as children.
“Vicky and I were very close. After our mother died, we.. He made a circling gesture with his wineglass, as if to entrap an escaping word. “We had no one else.”
“You must have been very lonely.”
“No. We had our own private world. We didn’t need anyone else. I don’t remember being lonely until Vicky started learning magic. I couldn’t follow her there.”
“Do you blame her?”
“For being a wizard?” He snorted. “Powers, no. Vicky wanted children.” He looked across at my expression, which I would have made blankly puzzled even if I’d known what he was talking about. “Oh, sorry. You won’t know about my cousin Cornell.”
“Your cousin Cornell?”
“My grandmother had two sons. My uncle Denis was the older. And a wizard. So he couldn’t inherit the Protectorship.” He raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded. “But he got married—nice woman, cadet branch of the Sevenii—and had an annemer son.”
“Oh,” I said. “Your cousin Cornell. I can see where this is going.”
He gave me a grimace. “When my father died, Cornell started making noise about his right to the Protectorship. And some people listened, and they agitated and made a fuss, and things got ugly. ’Til Cornell was found in the Sim with his throat cut.”
“That’s where I thought we’d end up,” I said grimly. Few if any stories in Marathine history had happy endings.
“It was eight years ago,” Stephen said. “We still don’t know who did it. Vicky says she’s not going to have children just to have them murdered for being politically inconvenient. I don’t blame her, but it makes her hard to work with sometimes.”
“Is it normal for a Lord Protector’s siblings to be, er, so high in the government?”
His eyes skewered me for a moment, but he chose not to ask why I wanted to know. “It depends,” he said. “Some are, some aren’t. I had to … show trust in Vicky and Shannon.”
“Because of Gloria Aestia?”
“Yes. We had to pull together, as Teverii. But I’d always wanted Vicky beside me.”
“Not Shannon?”
“Shannon and I …” He shrugged. “We’re brothers, but we aren’t what you’d call good friends.”
Stephen was well known not to like molls especially, and I wondered now how much of that was spillage from what was clearly a difficult relationship with his brother. Then I wondered how much of his dislike of Felix was because of Shannon. But before I could ask, Stephen smiled suddenly. “Powers. Horrible manners, boring on about my family. Here, you pick the topic.”
I could hardly tell him that his family was exactly what Vulpes wanted to hear about. Instead, I said, “Do you believe the envoy from the Bastion?”
“Believe how?”
“Well, you—I mean, the Mirador and the Bastion have been enemies for centuries. Do you really believe they want peace?”
“Funny question from a Kekropian.” He thought for a moment, choosing his words. “Yes, I think they must be tired of war. The saints know I am. I don’t trust them, but I believe them.”
A subtle paradox, especially from someone who seemed so bluntly straightforward. I asked, “How much do people here really know about the Bastion? Is it just a myth to frighten children, as the Mirador is in the Empire?”
“When Vicky and I were little, our nurse told us that the bad wizards from the Bastion would carry us off if we didn’t behave. And the defectors always tell the most frightful stories.”
“Yes,” I said. “We were terrified of it as kids—my grandfather threatened to tithe us when we’d been bad.”
“We?” said Stephen with an interrogative eyebrow.
You have to give if you want to take; I told him about Libbie and Damian, about my cousins Sasha and Eve and Quintus and the twins, Phineas and Geraint. I realized in the middle of one anecdote that Stephen was genuinely interested—he couldn’t be faking that expression—and with a sudden lightening of my entire spirit, told him the truly disgraceful story of what happened the time Uncle Kirby and Gran’père Mato got drunk in Semiramis. He roared with laughter, and for the first time in years I was able to remember things about my childhood besides my mother and Uncle René.
Again, Stephen waited until we’d been left with the hard liquor and sticky desserts to bring out his true purposes. “I am minded,” he said, “to take a lover.”
“Are you indeed?”
That got me a quirk of a grin. “I learn from my mistakes. I didn’t have lovers when I was married to Emily, and that gave her far too much power. Not over me necessarily, but in the court. My father made the opposite mistake—taking a lover after my mother died—and that landed us with Gloria.”
“You have thought about this a good deal.”
“Yes.”
“But why me?”
“Don’t be disingenuous.”
That stung. “You’ve never shown the slightest interest in me before:”
“Because I wasn’t getting married,” he said patiently. “And you were … occupied.”
“I have other lovers.”
“You won’t,” he said, face and voice suddenly hard. “He was the only one you cared about, and I will not share you.”
“You’re awfully possessive for a man who hasn’t heard the word ‘yes’ yet,” I said, both because I was irritated and because I needed to push this situation, find out what its limits were.
“Character flaw,” Stephen said. “If you turn me down, I won’t hold it against you. But if you accept, it will be exclusive until we tire of each other. I won’t hold you against your will, either.”
“I am relieved to hear it.”
“I’m jealous by nature,” he said. “Made more jealous by training. I’m not going to apologize for it, but I am telling you. I don’t like making uninformed decisions myself, and there’s no reason you should have to make them either.”
“Do you even like me?”
It was a ridiculous, childish question, but Stephen’s cold-bloodedness was unnerving me. That in itself was ridiculous, and I knew it, since I’d approached all of my affairs since Hallam with the same rigorous, dispassionate logic, but, no, I did not like being on the receiving end.
“Mehitabel.” He smiled. “If I didn’t want you in my bed, for company as much as for anything else, I’d hardly have gone this far. You aren’t an ideal choice by any means.”
“Being Kekropian.”
“And an actress. And damnably intelligent. Which I prefer, but it makes things more difficult.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Stephen, unlike Vulpes, wasn’t worried over possible irony. “It’s up to you.”
“If I say yes, I imagine it will be quite official?”
“Oh, yes. There’s a suite that belongs to the Lord—or Lady—Protector’s lover. It’ll be yours.”
“You won’t want me to give up the Empyrean.” I said it flatly, because I wasn’t asking.
“Of course not. Just your …” He was searching for a word, brows drawn down, and I knew suddenly what word he wanted. Boy-toys. Mildmay’s word. I wondered, not comfortably, how long Stephen had been watching and how long his jealousy had been festering.
“Quite,” I said. “I need some time to think.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to answer right away. We—meaning the Mirador—will be holding a soirée on Mercredy. I’ll send you an invitation tomorrow. Yes to one is yes to both. Will that do?”
It wasn’t much time, but it wasn’t the sort of decision that was going to get easier for long contemplation. “Yes,” I said. “It’ll do.”
I couldn’t talk to Thamuris about ghosts. But there was another side to the problem, and maybe the Troian approach to the dead would help here. Because none of the Marathine approaches I knew of were any better than useless. Most of them were worse.
I had worked out what I wanted to say to him about Malkar and what I most emphatically did not. I said, “I have … a kind of relic of a powerful blood-wizard, and I need to put it somewhere. But I need it to be safe, and I have to find a way to nullify it thaumaturgically.”
“A relic?” Thamuris was frowning. “What sort of relic does a blood-wizard leave? And is a blood-wizard what it sounds like?”
“Yes. And just exactly as vile as you imagine, too. And the, um, the jewels from his rings.” Some schools of Troian wizards still used rings; although the diviners of the Euryganeic Covenant were not among them, Thamuris did at least understand the theory.
“And is there a reason you haven’t destroyed them?”
“He had these rings for a very long time.” As long as I’d known him, anyway. “And the consistent use of architectural thaumaturgy does some very strange things to gemstones.”
“Define ‘strange,’ please.”
Damn him for asking cogent questions. I ran imaginary fingers through imaginary hair. “They would be very difficult to destroy, and they would … well, think of it as staining the place where it was done.” Somewhere in the depths of the Mirador there was a bricked-up room in which Porphyria Levant’s emeralds had been destroyed. I had never sought it out, but I knew I had been close to it more than once. I had felt the stain of their’magic, their mikkary, like the taste of burning metal in the air. It would disperse, given time, but no one knew how much time, and the Curia seemed determined to remain ignorant, as if refusal to acknowledge the problem could cause it to go away. All I could do, having argued myself hoarse on the subject until Giancarlo forbade me to mention it again, was not add to the problem. And thus I could no more destroy Malkar’s rubies than I could simply dispose of them. The mere thought of throwing them in the Sim made me feel as if my blood had been replaced by the river’s dark water.
“Ah,” said Thamuris. “You don’t want to talk about who they belonged to or how you got them, do you?”
“No,” I said, faster and harder than I’d meant to, and Thamuris controlled himself just short of recoiling.
“I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he said, and just as he had seen my semipanicked revulsion, I saw his hurt around him.
I shut my eyes, willing meaning into the gesture, using it to reassert my control over myself, both my construct-self and my own unruly emotions. It took me longer than it should have, long enough that when I opened my construct-eyes again, Thamuris was staring at me worriedly.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said carefully, crisply.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have pried.”
It was tempting to agree with that, too, but I said, “The important thing is to find a safe place to put these rubies. I want to be rid of them.”
“I can imagine. Are they powerful?”
“Not in their own right. They’re thaumaturgically charged, but it’s nothing as strong as a curse. It’s the synergistic effect with the Mirador that worries me.”
“Yes. You know, I wonder …”
“Yes?” I said, when the pause had stretched to an irritating length.
“Oh—just that I’ve been wondering about bringing something material across the boundaries of the Khloïdanikos, and—”
“You really think that’s possible?”
“I’m wondering. I don’t think it would work with ordinary objects, but something with a thaumaturgie charge, something that already casts a shadow into the world of the spirit … and it seems to me the Khloïdanikos ought to be able to nullify a mild charge such as you describe.”
My first impulse was to reject the idea utterly. I wanted to keep Malkar out of the Khloïdanikos, wanted to have one part of my life he could not touch. But then I caught myself. Malkar was dead. He couldn’t touch anything. Even the rubies weren’t actually imbued with Malkar’s spirit, only with the residue of the magic he had worked.
I am giving him too much power, I thought. There was nothing talismanic about the rubies—nor anything talismanic about the Khloïdanikos, for that matter. It did not symbolize my lost innocence. It most certainly did not need me to protect it, and I needed to rein in my vanity if I was imagining it did.
And what Thamuris was suggesting was, in fact, an elegantly simple solution to a problem over which I’d been giving myself headaches for weeks. “And it’s not as if it would have to be permanent,” I said, feeling much lighter and more cheerful. “If it doesn’t work, we can always remove them and try something else.”
“Exactly. It would be quite a useful experiment for any number of reasons.”
“Including the question of whether it’s possible at all.” /
“Yes. Quite.”
I considered the problem.
“It wouldn’t be difficult to create, a construct-token,” I said and then broke off, my breath catching in my throat as the answer clicked into place like the tumblers of a lock.
“Felix?”
I shook my head sharply, as if that might clear it or settle it. “Nothing. I think I know how to do it.”
“Just like that?” He didn’t sound disbelieving, merely a little uneasy.
“It …” I made a futile shaping gesture with both hands. “It fits with something I’ve been working on. Working with. A way to link thaumaturgie architecture and architectural thaumaturgy. Anyway, I’ll have gotten it worked out by the next time we meet.”
“You sound awfully certain.”
I smiled at him, trying not to see Malkar bursting into flames behind my eyes. “I’ve done it before.”
I went to bed early that night. Felix let me go, but later, a couple hours after I’d heard him and Gideon go into their room, my door opened and he came in, crowned with witchlights.
“You’re awake,” he said. He stopped maybe a foot inside the door.
“You ain’t asking,” I said and sat up.
“Sure, I’m fine.”
“I don’t suppose it is any of my business.”
That sat there for a minute, since I didn’t know what to say.
“Something’s eating at you,” he said. “If I promise not to lose my temper and not to say anything cruel, will you tell me what it is?”
“It ain’t Strych.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” he said, calm and almost gentle, and that gave me the nerve to say it.
“I’ve been thinking a lot. About Ginevra.”
“Ginevra. She still haunts you.” He wasn’t asking that time, either.
“Yeah, I guess.”
There was another long pause. I couldn’t read his face. Then he heaved a sigh and said, “May I sit down?”
“Sure,” I said and made room for him on the bed. He sat beside me and looked the candle into flame. He said, “I have always been afflicted with what Gideon calls true-dreaming. The longer the binding-by-forms has been in place, the more that ‘true-dreaming’ has included awareness of your dreams. I’ve fought it and fought it. I was afraid it would backlash, and you would start having my nightmares. But I can’t block it out completely. I didn’t want to tell you—I knew how much you’d hate it—but, frankly, I don’t think it’s going to go away.”
“Fucking marvelous.” I’d heard—sort of, anyway—his dreams at first, but that had gone after Strych. I’d just been glad.
“You dream about her a lot.”
“Yeah.”
He looked at me for a moment, then looked away and said, “When I was eleven, I lost everyone I cared about. The person I loved best in all the world died in my arms. I’ve told you about her.”
“Joline.” He’d said I reminded him of her.
“Lorenzo—the owner of the Shining Tiger, the brothel where … Lorenzo found me in the aftermath. By the time I had recovered from the initial shock, I …” He stopped completely.
I remembered the first time he’d told me about this, in the Gardens of Nephele. I remembered the black cloud I’d been in, and how it had been all I could do just to listen to his light voice and pay enough attention that the words made sense. I remembered him making some half-joke about prostitution and moving on, like it wasn’t no big deal. And, powers, I’d been so fucked up myself, I hadn’t even wondered about it.
He looked at me. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know if he wanted me to. I stayed silent. He said, “It was years before I was able to grieve. Partly, that was because there was always some new and hideous thing to deal with, and partly because Lorenzo didn’t waste any time introducing me to phoenix. Phoenix really is splendid, you know. You put the things you don’t want to deal with in a drawer and phoenix closes the drawer for you. But I had dreams.”
He stopped again. This time he seemed to want me to say something. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“I’m saying that … your dreams … it’s like you’re snagged on something. And I wondered … if I could help you find it, maybe?” He gave me a look, a funny one, sort of shy and sideways, and I don’t know how, but all at once the words were just there, and I said them.
“It’s my fault she died. I didn’t tell her.” There it was, the thing I’d been trying not to think since I’d dropped my cane in the Grenouille Salon. I took a deep, painful breath and buried my face in my hands.
“Didn’t tell her what?”
“Ginevra didn’t understand about Vey,” I said. “We never talked about it, but I think she thought Vey would forget or something—you know, after a while it would be okay again. And, powers, I don’t know, but I guess my reputation was still enough that it wasn’t worth Vey’s while to come after me.”
“But when Ginevra left you, she lost that protection.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think she’d leave, so I never sat her down and made her understand. She wasn’t stupid—you got to understand, Felix, she wasn’t stupid—but she was … she wouldn’t believe something unless she’d seen it for herself.”
“But you said someone gave information to Vey.”
“Yeah.”
“So I really don’t see how it can be your fault.”
“Don’t you get it? Out of that whole fucking tangle, I was the only guy who knew the stakes. And I didn’t tell Ginevra. I never tell people things. That’s my whole fucking problem.”
“It is a persistent motif.”
My glare must have been just this side of murder. He said quickly, “I didn’t mean to be flip—remember, I promised I wouldn’t say anything cruel. But you don’t tell people things. Only stories.”
“I don’t like talking,” I said and looked at my hands.
“I know that.” We were quiet for a while. Then he said, “I’ve probably got things all wrong, but can I ask a question? I promise I don’t mean it to be cruel or glib.”
“Go ahead.” My head was too heavy to lift.
“Did Ginevra ever ask you?”
“What?”
“Did she ever ask you about Vey? Did she ever say, ‘Tell me about that woman who tried to kill us both’?”
I was staring at him now. “No. I mean—I did tell her, but not much. And she … she asked about what Vey had been trying to do, but she didn’t ask about Vey. I don’t think she wanted to know.”
“Then she is at least as responsible for her death as you are. If someone wants to be blind, Mildmay, you can’t make them see.” There was a pause where I probably should’ve said something. He stood up. “I think I’ve done enough pontificating for one night. Unless … do you want me to stay?”
“I … no, I need to think.” But I wanted to give him something, because he’d cared enough to help, and he hadn’t been mean. “I think you said something important, but I gotta work it through.”
“I understand.” He went to the door, then stopped. “You know,” he said. “You know, if you ever want me to ward your dreams, I will. I won’t even ask any questions.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll remember.”
“Good night, then.”
“Yeah, good night.”
He went out and shut the door. I was left staring at it, like it could tell me something important. I’d’ve liked to get up—to leave the suite and go walk around the Mirador while everything settled inside my head—but even with my new stick, I didn’t think that was a smart idea.
If someone wants to be blind, you can’t make them see.
That was Ginevra all right. It was a lot more her than her looks and her figure, which was all anybody, including me, had ever seemed to care about. She hadn’t been stupid, but if Ginevra didn’t want to see a thing, then that thing just plain was not there. Ever.
I remembered the one time I’d tried to tell her about my childhood, about growing up a kept-thief. She’d asked one day in Thermidor, and I’d known she’d been thrill-seeking, but I’d been mad in love, and I’d tried. I’d really tried to tell her the truth. She’d believed all the things I told her, but I remembered now the way her attention had skipped past the things I’d tried to say about Keeper and about the other kids. She wanted the stuff that sounded romantic to her, that fit in with her ideas about herself and about me and about what I was doing in the great romantic story of Ginevra Thomson.
How had that conversation ended? I racked my memory, staring at the damn door like I’d find the answers there, and finally remembered. I’d lied. I’d been desperate to distract her before she pissed me off and I told her what it was like to strangle somebody and feel their clawing, heaving body become nothing but a dead, stupid sack of meat against you, and so I’d started this huge, elaborate lie about Keeper sending me to steal the great Black Crown of the House of Tamerinsius. It took Ginevra a while to realize I was lying. By the time she did, the story was rolling, and it did its job. When I’d finished—well, actually, a little before the story was really over—we’d made love. It had been good, and by the time we were done, I’d managed to forget how Ginevra had made me feel.
She never listened to you, Milly-Fox, a voice said.
That ain’t true! I twisted around and slammed my fist into the pillow, like it was the one saying stuff I didn’t want to hear.
She never listened to you. She liked being the lover of Mildmay the Fox, the greatest cat burglar in the Lower City, but she wasn’t interested in you, you poor, stupid son of a bitch. She was as blind to who you are as she was blind to Vey.
I hadn’t told her, but odds were she wouldn’t have listened if I’d tried.
Whatever she’d loved, it hadn’t been me.