Gordeny and Corinna helped me find the dress I needed: heavy tea-colored velvet, its only adornment the pearl buttons down the back and sleeves. It draped me as if I’d been measured for it. I braided my hair back and caught the mass in a lace snood the same color as the dress. The effect was unexpectedly stunning; I looked austere and regal, like an Ophidian queen stepped down out of her portrait frame.
Stephen’s butler actually bowed slightly to me this time, almost involuntarily. He handed me over to a footman, who escorted me into a part of Stephen’s apartments I hadn’t seen before. This room was much larger than the parlor I’d rated on previous visits, and I guessed it was what Keria Gauthy would have called a drawing room. Stephen, standing before the mantel, under a portrait of a dark, square-faced man who had to be his father, Lord Gareth, turned when the footman announced me.
“Every time you come, I have to think of a new adjective,” he said. “Tonight you are magnificent.”
“Thank you, my lord,” I said and swept a low curtsy.
“You’re the first to arrive,” he said, another of his tiresomely gnomic statements. Was it supposed to be a fact, a warning, or a commendation? I said, choosing brisk rather than nervous, “Who else is coming?”
“No one’s going to denounce you as a scarlet woman,” he said, perfectly deadpan, so that I couldn’t tell whether he was teasing or reassuring me. I let a little exasperation show.
“Sorry,” he said. “My sister and brother, Lord Philip Lemerius and his daughter Lady Enid, and Lord Robert of Hermione.” I thought of Semper, laughing with Gordeny over our impromptu lunch of sausages and spiced chick peas. Thought of Antony savagely dissecting court mores. Of all the people I didn’t want to meet at Lord Stephen’s dinner table, Semper and Antony’s father was near the head of the list.
“Lady Victoria Teveria,” said the footman.
I turned as Lady Victoria came into the room. “Good evening, Stephen,” she said. “Madame Parr.” She gave me a small, stiff nod.
Victoria Teveria was the eldest of Gareth Teverius’s three children. She was taller than Stephen, and they looked very little like each other, except for the gray eyes. Victoria wasn’t beautiful, but a stern regularity of feature made her uncompromisingly handsome. The words “stern,”
“uncompromising,” and “regular” also did well to sum up her character. She was a wizard (she, like most of the female wizards of the Mirador, scorned the feminines that people persisted in trying to make up: wizardess, wizardine, or even just wizarde). Her dress was gray and severe, tailored to the point of resembling a military uniform. She wore the gold wizard’s sash as the men did, diagonally from right shoulder to left hip. Her rings were made of sapphire and silver; they looked odd and slightly unearthly against her dark, brooding presence.
It was immediately obvious that she wasn’t pleased with Lord Stephen, and the cause of her displeasure wasn’t far to seek. Lord Stephen just smiled and listened to us talk—or, more accurately, listened to his sister unfurl her flags and make the first maneuvers in what was clearly going to be a very polite and very bloody war. Happily, before she’d found her range, more guests were announced, this time Lord Philip and Lady Enid, and Lady Victoria deserted me for them with only the barest apology.
Lord Philip—and oh the idiocy of the Mirador’s peerage, in which the head of a cadet branch of a middle-rank family had the identical honorific to the Lord Protector—was a dull, pompous, closed-minded man. He looked choleric this evening, and I saw him glaring at me over his daughter’s head. You are a remarkably black pot, my lord, I thought. And what will you think when you learn of your son’s new occupation?
This was the first time I’d seen Lady Enid, though Antony had told me about her; she was his youngest sister, and the only unmarried one. She was a pretty girl, much resembling Antony, but without the dour lines that marked his face. She was properly and becomingly dressed in yellow, tall and slender and straight, with bright dark eyes far warmer than those of either her father or her full brother. Her swan-daughter was more natural than mine, the result of careful training rather than deliberate artifice. And as befitted a young and unmarried lady, she was staying quiet and grave and graceful; even when she laughed at some remark of Stephen’s, it was a brief, trilling chuckle, as decorous as a laugh could possibly be.
She took her introduction to me gracefully as well, and I suspected she had been coached. Enid was not, of course, permitted to attend the theater, but she had read Berinth the King in the classroom, and if I thought there was genuine wistfulness in her voice when she said, “I would have liked to see you perform Aven,” it might only have been my imagination.
It did, however, give me an opening. “I would be very pleased to give a private recital, if you’d like.”
She began to smile, but then glanced at her glowering father and schooled her face. She was about to refuse when Stephen said, “I think that’s an excellent idea.”
For a moment, we all stood frozen in tableau, and at exactly that moment, the butler announced Lord Shannon.
“Good evening,” he said. “What’s an excellent idea, Stephen?”
“Madame Parr has offered to give a recital for Enid.”
Lord Shannon’s gentle, rather shallow eyes lit up. “What a lovely idea! Might others of us attend if we wished?”
“I don’t see why not,” Stephen said. “I’ll tell Leveque to speak to you about the arrangements, Mehitabel.”
“Thank you, my lord,” I said, and as Shannon immediately claimed my attention with a question about the recent crisis at the Empyrean, Lord Philip was able to get Enid away without being openly rude.
The room divided itself into two camps, made even more obvious when Robert of Hermione arrived. He barely bowed over my hand before all but attaching himself to Victoria, and thus the schism was complete; Lord Philip and Lady Victoria with Enid and Robert on one side, myself and Lord Shannon on the other. Stephen, a neutral potentate, stood by the mantel and watched with great, possibly malicious interest.
Noticing my appraising glance, Lord Shannon murmured, “You shall be known by the company you keep.”
“Indeed, my lord. And how do you choose to be known, then?”
“Not meaning any disparagement, Madame Parr, but I would rather stand with a wolverine in heat than with Robert.”
“Gracious,” I said, and he smiled at me, such a dazzling brightness that it was no wonder he had half the young men of the Mirador at his feet. No wonder he’d held Felix’s fickle attention for nearly five years.
“I don’t imagine the enmity between us is any secret.”
“No, my lord,” I said demurely, and he laughed.
“Besides which, I’d much rather be talking to you than Philip and Vicky.”
“And Lady Enid?”
He shrugged, as graceful as any ballet dancer. “She’s an amiable child, and I wish Stephen much joy of her.”
“You think it’s settled then?”
“Oh, I don’t know, but if it isn’t her, it’ll be another just like her. But at least,” he added savagely, “it’ll put Robert’s nose out of joint.”
“We should talk of something else,” I said.
“Powers, why? Robert knows I hate him.”
My curiosity got the better of me. “Couldn’t you influence Stephen, if you hate him so much?”
“It was Emily’s dying wish. She made him promise.”
“To protect Lord Robert?” I looked across the room: Robert was tall for a man of Marathine blood, his hair still dark and glossy, although he’d developed a definite paunch, and the lines of what must once have been a handsome face were sagging and puffy. He didn’t look like a man who needed protection.
Shannon sighed eloquently. “Emily was … she was very loyal. And gullible. She believed what Robert told her—and what Robert told her was that he had many enemies in the court who were plotting against him. I understand that it preyed on her mind toward the end. So Stephen promised he would protect Robert against his enemies.”
“And he kept his promise.”
“Teverii. As stubborn as they are honorable and vice versa. And Stephen has his own blind spots.”
The bitterness in his voice prompted me to ask, “Do you not consider yourself a Teverius, my lord?”
“Me?” And bitterness indeed, more than I would have expected from a man like him. “I’m as faithless as my mother. You know that.”
I couldn’t have been more utterly taken aback if the sofa I was standing next to had turned and savaged me. I was fully aware of my own discomfiture, and even as I scrambled futilely for a rejoinder, I was thinking I ought to give Shannon Teverius some sort of award. It had been years since I’d been caught out like this.
And then he was saying, “I beg your pardon, Madame Parr. That was unfair and uncalled for, and in any event, I believe Stephen wants to take you into dinner.”
And indeed there was Stephen looming at my shoulder. “Mehitabel?”
“Me, my lord?” I said inelegantly. God, the next thing I knew, I’d be blushing. “Shouldn’t—”
“You accepted my invitation,” he said and held out his arm.
I had been even more right than I knew. There was nothing else for it: I took his arm as gracefully as I could and moved as a swan-daughter into the dining room.
Gideon did not want me to go to the soirée.
I asked him why, struggling to be reasonable, and he merely shrugged and turned away.
“Gideon?”
:Is it not enough that I have asked?:
:Well, frankly, no. And it’s not like you to try that sort of manipulation, anyway.: He’d been out of sorts all afternoon, sniping at me with more than his usual, amiable venom, goading me into retort time and again—Mildmay had made his escape almost immediately after dinner—and if he’d planned to manipulate me, he wouldn’t have gotten my back up so thoroughly as a start. Something had to be wrong. :What is it?:
:I don’t imagine you’ll care about my reasons. You never have before.:
“Either talk to me or don’t,” I said, stalking into the bedroom to choose a coat.
:Is there any use? Really?:
“I don’t know,” I said with exaggerated patience. “Since you won’t tell me what you’re talking about, I’m hardly qualified to say.”
:Don’t be disingenuous.:
:I’m not.: I turned to face him, digging my nails into my palms against the urge to strike him or shout at him. :I’m asking you to stop fencing and tell me what the matter is.:
:Isaac Garamond.:
:What?:
He held my gaze. :Or whoever it is you’ll go off with this time. But most likely Messire Garamond, since he is your newest toy.:
“Gideon, I—”
:Don’t think of him that way? Of course you do. How stupid have I been, Felix, to imagine that you think of me in any other way?:
:You know perfectly well I don’t—:
:I know no such thing! You’ve certainly never bothered to be faithful to me.:
:It’s not like that.:
:I beg to differ. It is exactly like that. If I asked, could you even tell me the names of all the men you’ve slept with in the past two years?:
“Sleeping isn’t an activity I engage in with other men, darling,” I said, turning back to the wardrobe and yanking out a coat. “And anyway, you’ve made it perfectly clear what you will and won’t put up with, so—”
:Have I? When? When have I ever refused you anything?: “The look on your face was more than enough, thank you.” And the memory still stung like salt on raw flesh.
:So it’s my fault? You’re going out … :
“Whoring is the word you’re looking for,” I said and gave him a hard smile.
:Is it? Isaac Garamond isn’t a whore.:
“Is that what this is about? You’re jealous of Isaac?”
:Blessed saints, am I jealous?: His stare was incredulous as well as infuriated. :I’m forty-five, Felix, and apparently inadequate for your sexual sophistication. Why in the world would I be jealous?:
“Because you’re being stupid,” I said, shrugging into my waistcoat and doing up the buttons. “Whatever I do with … with other men, has nothing to do with you.”
The ferocity of his tone startled me into looking at him; his eyes were brilliant with anger, his hands clenched—he was more vital and compelling than I’d seen him in months. :You may believe it has nothing to do with me, but you’re wrong. I am telling you, as plainly as I can, it has everything to do with me, and I can’t stand it any longer.:
“You’re awfully dramatic,” I said, going to the mirror to tie my cravat. I was careful not to meet my own eyes.
:No, don’t think you’ll slide out from under by making me embarrassed. You love dramatics, and you know it.:
“So what are you leading up to, anyway?” I said, doing my best to sound unconcerned. ‘Throwing me over?”
:Not unless you make me.:
“I can’t make you do anything.”
:Liar.:
I hoped he couldn’t see my flinch.
:I’m telling you,: he said, :if you want me to stay, you have to stay.:
“But—”
:Coming back is not the same as staying, and don’t pretend you think it is.:
Luckily, Malkar had drilled me in the proper tying of a cravat until I could do it with my mind three-quarters elsewhere. “What is it you want, Gideon?”
:I want you to stop going to other men’s beds. Whatever it is you need, let me do it.:
Oh, you don’t want that, I thought, and did not smile at my reflection. I turned to get my coat.
:All or nothing, Felix. I won’t stand for anything else.:
“I hear you,” I said.
:And?:
“Now that I have my orders,” I said, keeping my voice mild, “I guess I can decide whether to obey or to mutiny.”
That’s not what I meant.:
“No? That’s certainly what it sounded like.” I shrugged my coat on, checked my reflection again.
:Do you truly not care?:
“Of course I care. But you don’t understand—”
:Because you won’t let me.: He caught my wrist. :Felix, please.:
“All right!” I said and pulled free. “But I’m still going to this damned soirée. I promise, however, that I will not come back to anyone’s bed but yours. Will that do?”
He looked at me for a long moment. I wondered, as I always wondered, what it was he saw, what it was he thought he loved. Finally, he said, :The sign of a good compromise. We’re both angry. Yes, go. We’ll get no use out of each other this evening anyway.:
“How right you are,” I said and left, slamming the door vindictively behind me.
Saints and blessed powers, we were late. We were so late I damn near told Felix we’d be better off not going, but he was in the mood to rip somebody’s head off, and I didn’t feel like it needed to be mine.
His mood was Gideon’s fault. I don’t know what Gideon’s problem was that afternoon, but he was pissed at Felix and he wasn’t letting go of it, neither. They were sort of snarling at each other all through dinner, and it only got worse when Maurice came in with the hot water and Felix started getting ready.
I got dressed and rebraided my hair and tried to ignore them. But Felix was starting to answer Gideon out loud, and that was a real bad sign. I said loudly, “I’ll be out in the hall when you’re ready, Felix,” and ducked out the door before he could think to stop me. I hated watching them fight, and if I was in the hall, it might maybe give Felix a way to escape quicker.
A quarter of an hour later I knew that idea wasn’t working, but it was still better to be out there not listening to them. I said hello to a couple of maids trotting past. Another half-hour went by, just me and Jashuki and the weird people in the tapestries on the walls, and then Maurice came up from the other direction. He stopped when he saw me.
“Don’t go in,” I said.
“Are they, er…?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn,” he said.
“You in a hurry?”
He shifted his weight. Maurice had never told me where he was from, and I pretended I didn’t know. Guys who get themselves into the Mirador from Gilgamesh don’t need a blabbermouth spoking their wheel. Maurice and Rollo were a matched set—tall, broad-shouldered, dark—and they got along okay. I knew they wanted to get into service in one of the Houses, and to do that you got to get yourself noticed by the flashies—which ain’t easy to do if you’re stuck valeting a wing of the Mirador that’s all hocuses.
“Master Architrave said that he’d have some Work for Rollo and me if we could get there by eight-thirty.”
“Then go.”
“What? I can’t—”
“Sure you can. Felix won’t yell.”
He gave me a look like he thought maybe I was nuts. Maurice and Rollo were both in the cult of Felix big-time, and they thought Felix would be pissed off or heartbroken or something if they weren’t perfect, but the truth was Felix wouldn’t even notice.
“If he asks,” I said, “I’ll tell him you’ve got a chance at something better. Honest, Maurice, he won’t mind.”
“All right,” Maurice said and grinned like a kid. “Thanks! I owe you one.”
“Yeah, sure. Just go on.”
He went. I walked slowly down to the end of the hall and back, trying to pay attention to what my right leg was telling me. If I’d hurt myself bad enough … Just thinking about it felt like somebody’d stuck me in a cage and was getting ready to close the door. My bad leg had already cut me off from what I’d thought was my life—cat burglary and the Lower City and all the trouble you could get yourself into and out of if you had two good legs. And my stupid, dragging, aching leg already made the life I had now worse, because Felix never could quite remember that I couldn’t walk as fast as him. I thought of the staircases to the Crown of Nails and felt like crying. And if I’d really made my leg worse, it was going to get real quick to where I’d have to tell Felix I couldn’t keep up with him. And that would mean either that Felix would have to rearrange his life for his stupid, crippled brother or that he’d go off without me even more often than he did now. I hated the fuck out of both options.
I walked down to the other end of the hall and back, slowly. Then I stood and waited and tried not to think about anything in particular. That was getting harder, too.
Felix came slamming out the door at about the third hour of the night. Like I said, he was pissed. He gave me one look, like he was daring me to say something, but I wasn’t that dumb. He sort of snorted and started down the hall. I followed, laying odds with myself about how drunk he was going to get.
The closer we got to the Hall of the Chimeras, the slower he walked, and he finally ducked aside into the Puce Antechamber. I went after him like a dog on a leash.
“Is my coat straight?” he said. He was wearing a deep violetblue coat over a green and white striped waistcoat. The combination made his gold sash and gamet-and-gold rings stand out like a shout. I was in my usual black—trousers, waistcoat, coat—and a plain white shirt. Felix had kept trying for months to get me to wear ruffles at cuffs and collar, but that idea was nuts, and I’d told him to go put garlands on a pig. He’d been mad at me for days, but he’d quit hinting.
“Your coat’s fine,” I said, “and you know it.”
I thought he was going to say something nasty, and so did he, but then he sighed and said, “Yes. What about my face?”
“You’re a little pale, but you ain’t blotchy. Nobody’ll notice.”
“With the crush in there, I’ll be beet-red in two minutes,” he said, and he faked cheerful pretty well. He gave me the onceover. “You’ll do. Come on.” I followed him back out of the Puce Antechamber and into the Hall of the Chimeras.
We’d missed all the formal stuff, so the Hall of the Chimeras was just a big clump of people talking and drinking. In an hour, they’d clear the middle of the floor, and there’d be dancing. Felix would probably be drunk enough by then to dance, which he was good at if he wasn’t thinking about it. I couldn’t dance no more, so I’d sit somewhere out of the way and watch all the pretty ladies and wish I could get a game of Long Tiffany going. It was what usually happened.
Powers, I hate this, I thought, and I was only glad that I wasn’t Felix and didn’t have to smile. Although, if I’d been Felix, I would’ve been able to get drunk, because I would’ve known my boring little brother would get me home okay. I don’t like being drunk and never have, but at the Lord Protector’s soirées, it always seemed like a better deal than being sober. Being at home in bed would’ve been better still.
Sure enough, when we got to the bar, there were Maurice and Rollo behind it. Master Architrave had done them a high-class favor, because that was the one place in the Hall of the Chimeras where they were guaranteed the flashies would notice them. They both looked guilty when they saw Felix, like a pair of foxes with feathers in their mouths, but he just said, “Bourbon please. Two fingers, straight.”
“Yes, my lord,” Rollo managed. As he handed Felix the glass, Felix said, “I’m glad to see you get liberated from our corridor once in a while,” and sauntered off into the crowd. Maurice gave me a weird look, sort of half-panicked and halfgrateful. I shrugged back and kept after Felix. I didn’t want to lose him until he’d found somebody safe to talk to.
He came up on a knot of hocuses talking about Lord Stephen’s marriage. We’d missed the beauty pageant, too, which I figured was at least one good thing I’d gotten out of the evening. Andromachy Sain and Elissa Bullen were just disgusted with the whole thing, and this mousy little lady wizard who was a connection of the Tamerinsii was trying to make them see how wrong they were. Fleur and Edgar and Simon were working out a pool. Edgar didn’t even say hello before he wanted to know what Felix thought the odds were of Lord Stephen marrying a Polydoria.
“Thousand to one,” Felix said.
“Even a pretty one?” Fleur asked.
“Just like his mother?” Felix said and bared his teeth at Fleur.
“Well, they’re all cousins anyway,” Simon said.
“It would be bad politics,” Felix said.
“And Stephen won’t do that,” Edgar said. “I agree with Felix, little flower.”
“Don’t call me that,” Fleur said. “You know it gives me hives.”
“Who are the other candidates?” Felix asked.
Edgar rattled them off: “There’s a Valeria, a Novadia, the youngest Lemeria chit, an Otania—horse-faced—a Sevemia, and of course the Polydoria. Those are the only real contenders.”
“Apparently, you can scratch the Polydoria,” Simon said. “That brings it down to five.”
“Poor little thing,” Fleur said. “She can’t be a day over fifteen.”
“Then it’s a good thing Stephen isn’t going to marry her, isn’t it?” Felix said.
Fleur said, “Felix, you’re such a blight. Pick your favorite and quit sniping at me.”
“Oh, the Lemeria,” Felix said. “Stephen’s thick as thieves with that pompous twit.”
Fleur and Simon would keep him from getting in a fight if it could be done at all. I faded back. He’d get annoyed with me if I stuck around too much longer, said he didn’t like me breathing down his neck. Of course, it wasn’t like I had anybody else I could go talk to, but I think that was part of what pissed him off.
So I did what I’d been getting damn good at and just moved through the crowd. I tried to stay in sight of Felix’s red hair, but otherwise I didn’t even care where I went. It didn’t matter. The trick was to keep people from noticing me particularly. That had been really hard at first, when everybody acted like I had plague or lice or something, but I’d been trailing around after Felix for quite a while now, and I hadn’t bit nobody yet. People were getting good at ignoring me, and I sure as fuck wasn’t listening to them, just trying to keep moving so I wouldn’t have to think.
Finally, my bad leg aching, I stopped and leaned against King Richard’s pedestal. I figured a maybe-fratricide was good company for me. That’s where Thaddeus found me.
“Mildmay! There you are!” So he’d been looking for me, and that was worrisome for a start. Him and Felix had been friends once, but they weren’t no more, so what the fuck did he want with me?
But it wasn’t like he’d tell me if I asked, so I just said, “Evening, Lord Thaddeus,” and tried to sound more or less like I meant it.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you—how is Gideon taking the news from the Bastion?”
Like we were all friends or something. “You mean General Mercator croaking?”
“And the promise of amnesty.”
He hadn’t even looked disapproving at my language the way hocuses always did. He wanted something. I said, careful-like, “Well, he ain’t in no hurry to go back.”
“No, I’m certain he’s not.” He tried again. “What has he said about it?”
“But surely you’ve heard him and Felix discussing it.” Bright, bright eyes, like a buzzard waiting for a coyote to die.
“They don’t do most of their talking out loud.” Which was only sort of trae, but it’d do for Thaddeus.
He gave me a look, like he was wondering if I was really that stupid or if I was blocking him on purpose. You go on and wonder, asshole, I thought. I could play this game all night if I had to.
One thing you could say about Thaddeus de Lalage. He wasn’t a quitter. He said, quiet and pretending to be casual, “They’re all spies, you know.”
“Um,” I said.
“Eusebian wizards. They can’t help it. You shouldn’t trust any of those who haven’t taken our oaths.”
Meaning Gideon, of course, who hadn’t taken the Mirador’s oaths because Thaddeus had made a ruckus and got half the Curia on his side with it.
Now, I didn’t know what Thaddeus’s thing with the Bastion was—why he hated ’em so much he couldn’t see straight. And I didn’t want to know. What I did know was about witch-hunts and Keeper teaching us all how to recognize hocuses from the Mirador and what we should do if we saw one. The first thing was to get the fuck out of the way. The second was to run—and when she said run, she meant it—to the nearest hocus we knew and tell ’em to get their head down. Keeper charged for most everything she did in the Lower City, but never for that. And it didn’t seem to me like there was enough space between They’re all spies and They’re all filthy heretics.
But it also didn’t seem like that was a smart thing to say to Thaddeus. So I just nodded and kept my mouth shut.
“Gideon lies like an angel,” Thaddeus said, and his hand caught my biceps. Hard. Now, I could’ve made him let go of me, but that was asking for a whole different kind of trouble, and with Felix in the mood he was in, I didn’t think more trouble was what anybody needed. Besides, I knew what the Mirador thought of me. Some days it was like I could feel the smug ghost of Cerberus Cresset padding around behind me, a knife sticking out of his chest and blood all over everything. So I stood there and listened to Thaddeus, knowing he was only talking to me because he didn’t dare say this shit to Felix. “It was why Major Goliath valued him so highly. And maybe still does.”
He was watching me now, slyly, wanting to see his bolts hit home. Even if I had believed him, I wouldn’t’ve given him that, so I just looked back at him. He hadn’t actually asked a question, and I wasn’t volunteering nothing.
After a moment, he let go of me, almost with a push. “I’m watching,” he said, and he was angry, so he must’ve figured out I was stonewalling after all. “And you can tell him that.” He stalked off, as mad as if I’d been insulting his friends instead of the other way ’round.
I reckoned it was a good time to go find Felix. Because suddenly I felt like I really needed just to see him. They were getting ready to start the dancing anyway, and I wanted to be sure my spot on the sidelines would be okay with him. For all that he didn’t want me with him, it really pissed him off when he couldn’t find me. So we went together along the lines of spindly Jecquardin chairs, and I was just about to say, “This one’ll do fine,” when I realized he wasn’t paying attention.
He’d stopped dead in his tracks and was staring at two men arguing a little farther down the line. One was a tallish, heavy-set flashie, with one of them blank well-bred faces that don’t mean nothing. I didn’t think he could be the one Felix was staring at like a sheep. The other man was clearly one of the fancy hookers who cater to the flashies. If you asked me to explain how it was clear, I don’t think I could, but he wasn’t a flashie and he wasn’t a hocus, and he sure as fuck wasn’t an ordinary servant, since the coat he was wearing, mulberry with silver embroidery, cost at least as much as Felix’s.
Even at this distance, he looked a little old for a hooker. I was guessing he was Felix’s age or better. He was a small guy, no more than five-foot-six, and he looked about as heavy-fleshed as a bird. He’d braided his hair down to the nape and then let it fall to his waist, black as sin. The ribbon tying it was mulberry, too, a couple shades lighter than his coat. His skin was pale, like Kolkhis’s, with those cold blue undertones that made her look some mornings like the world’s most beautiful corpse. This guy just looked tired. Kolkhis always claimed—and I never had decided if she was joking or not—that her coloring showed she descended from the ancient Emperors of the West.
I was just thinking, Oh come on, Felix, please don’t know this guy, when the hooker turned away from the flashie, fullface to us. His eye caught Felix’s. And then he was staring, just like Felix was.
Felix snapped himself out of it and said, in a perfectly normal, cheerful voice, “Well, I’ll be damned. Vincent, is that you?”
The hooker’s eyes widened. Then he came toward us. “Felix! Merciful powers, I never imagined I would see you again.” He extended his hand. His nails were long and lacquered black, another sign of a high-class hooker.
The two of them shook hands. Then Felix laughed and said, “Damn propriety!” and hugged him. The hooker hugged him back, his eyes bright.
“I thought you were dead,” he said to Felix. “I couldn’t imagine that you would survive that man.”
“I nearly didn’t. But what happened to you?”
The hooker sighed, and his shoulders sagged. “It is a very long and boring story and certainly not suitable for a soirée.”
“Could you come visit me tomorrow afternoon?”
Shit, I thought. That was his research day, and normally nobody could fuck with that.
The hooker stood and thought it over. “I am in the service of Lord Ivo Polydorius. I would have to ask.”
“I could send you a fancy invitation,” Felix said, teasing and serious both at the same time, “on my best gilt-edged paper. If I can find it, I’ll even seal it with my signet.”
The hooker gave him a smile, and for a second he looked way younger. “That would be a great help.”
“Done. I’ll send Mildmay with it—gracious, my manners! Vincent, this is my brother, Mildmay Foxe. Mildmay, this is Vincent Demabrien. I knew him when we were boys.”
“Charmed,” said Vincent Demabrien.
“Yeah,” I said. Felix kicked my right ankle, hard. “I mean, it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Demabrien.” We shook hands. I didn’t think Mr. Demabrien had missed the byplay, but he didn’t say nothing about it. Good manners, anyway.
“I have to get back,” he said, with a jerk of his head to where the flashie was standing. “If the invitation arrives before court, I may have time to talk him around.”
“Marvelous,” Felix said and gave him the full-force, five-alarm smile—not to charm him, but just because he liked him. Felix had never smiled that way at me.
“Honestly,” Felix said when Mr. Demabrien was out of earshot, “I could get better manners out of a hatrack than I can out of you. Will this chair suit your lordship?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
He swanned off to charm Fleur or Lunette or Andromachy into dancing with him. I sat down and put my head in my hands.
Perhaps an hour and a half into the dancing, Felix approached me, swept a low, magnificent bow, and said, “Will you dance with me, Madame Parr?”
“I don’t know. What’s your ulterior motive?”
He laughed. “I want to talk with you. Come on, Tabby, I miss your shining wit.”
“My susceptibility to flattery, you mean,” I said, and he laughed again. I realized that he wasn’t drunk, as I’d initially suspected, simply ebullient. “All right. You win.”
Felix was a surprisingly good dancer, as long as you never made the critical error of complimenting him on it. After a moment, I asked, “So how do you come to be on such good terms with Ivo Polydorius’s light of love?” That was the question occupying at least half the people in the Hall of the Chimeras; speculation was rampant.
“Don’t bother with tact, do you?”
“It’d be wasted on you, sunshine. Come on, spill.”
“We were boys together,” he said negligently.
Considering what very little I knew of Felix Harrowgate’s childhood, that raised more questions than it answered. But he clearly wasn’t going to tell me, and in any event I’d just caught sight of Vulpes in the crowd. His spell must have slipped. Got you, you little weasel, I thought, and said, “Felix?”
“In your arms, Tabby.”
“Don’t look like you’re looking, but who’s the wizard standing by King Cyprian? The one in the mustard-colored coat?”
“Isaac Garamond,” Felix said without looking at all. “Why?”
My heart was suddenly pounding nauseously in my chest. “He’s from the Bastion, you know.”
“Yes, I’m well aware.”
“No. I mean, from the Bastion.”
“What do you—ah. Should I ask why you know, or why you’re telling me?”
“Don’t,” I said, and I knew he could feel the cold sweat starting on my palms. “Please.”
We were silent for several measures before he said thoughtfully, “I’d always imagined you were the type to laugh at a blackmailer.”
“It’s not me. There’s someone … someone I love, and I can’t …”
“You’ve got considerably heavier cannons than me in your arsenal these days.”
“It won’t help. I know how Eusebian wizards communicate. And how fast. And it wouldn’t take …” I wasn’t faking my distress, although I was giving into it more than I normally would have.
“You must love this person very much,” Felix said.
I couldn’t answer that, but said simply, “I can’t risk him. Felix, please. I told you because you need to know, but Garamond’s only gathering information. Just—be careful what you say to him. And don’t tell anyone. Please.”
“I’m surprised you trusted me enough to tell me,” he remarked, that negligent tone again, the one that meant he was hiding pain. “Given my past history.”
“I do you the honor of thinking you learn from your mistakes,” I said stiffly, matching bleakness for bleakness.
“Thank you,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. Then I felt the sudden increase of tension in all the long bones of his already tense body. “I believe our tête-à-tête, delightful though it has been, is about to be ended. Here comes your swain.”
“My … oh God, Felix, must you?”
He was laughing at me as he released my hands and bowed extravagantly to Stephen. But he mouthed silently, I promise, just as he turned away, and even if it was foolish of me, I believed him.
Stephen was in a mood to be possessive; I’d never been danced with so heavily in my life. I wasn’t in a mood to put up with it and said, “Surely you don’t imagine Felix would be poaching on your preserves?”
He snorted. “No, it’s only my brother Lord Felix steals.” There was nothing I could say to that; another turn and Stephen said, “Every damn puppy in the room is making eyes at you.”
“They can hardly make anything else,” I said reasonably, but that, if anything, seemed to increase his anger. Deliberately, coldly, I imagined telling this glowering bear that I spied for the Bastion because they held the life of the man I loved.
He’d send me to the sanguette. And Louis Goliath would tell Hallam I was dead and watch dispassionately as his grief destroyed whatever was left of him. And nothing in the Bastion would change.
I shook off that future and said tartly, “If you bruise me, my lord, you will be looking for another actress.”
That reached him. He said, “Oh—sorry,” and his grip eased.
“I accepted your invitation. And your terms along with it.” And because the conversation with Felix was still fresh to the point of rawness, I added, “I do have my own kind of honor.”
The basilisk eyes caught mine, revealing, as ever, nothing of what Stephen thought. Then he nodded. “I will remember.”
We finished the waltz in silence, each alone with our own dragons.