I knocked on Hugo’s door. He was a stupid rabbit and opened it. Two seconds later, he was pinned against his bedroom wall with my knife at his throat, and the door was closed.
“Mildmay,” he said, gasping because my hold on his collar was choking him. “W-w-what—”
“That’s what you’re gonna tell me,” I said. “Vey Coruscant, Hugo. You’re going to tell me all about her.”
“She’s dead!”
“Yeah, I got that part.” I increased my leverage just a little, tilting his jaw up with the flat of my knife. His breath was sour. “But before she was dead, you had shit going on with her. You told her how to find Ginevra.”
“I didn’t!”
“Don’t fucking lie to me. You did. And you know what the sad part is? I don’t even care. It bit you on the ass, didn’t it?”
“Austin wasn’t supposed to die,” he said in this horrible watery whimpering voice.
“Yeah, well, that’s what you get when you fuck around with Vey Coruscant. Even if you are in good with her.” I shook him a little, to be sure he was paying attention. “You used to run messages to her. From the Mirador. And now I understand you’re running messages to Kolkhis. And I wanna know who your boss is.”
“How’d you find out?” he said in a panicky little whisper.
“I got my sources. Who is it?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“’Course you can, same way I can cut your throat. Or, you know, pop your eyeball like a cherry tomato.”
He was a clever rabbit, but he was a rabbit. “Lord Ivo! Him and Lord Robert and some other lords—I don’t know all their names, I swear!”
“Fuck me sideways ’til I cry,” I said. That sure explained how Robert had known about Cornell Teverius. “Is this the truth? I’m tired of you lying to me.”
“I swear it! I swear it! Anything you like!”
And it probably was the truth. I realized, standing there with Hugo’s breath sobbing inches from my face, that this was too big for me. If Lord Ivo’d been tangled up in trying to get Lord Shannon on the throne once, and if he’d been laying low for two septads but he’d come back, and then Lord Stephen hadn’t married his daughter, and Kolkhis was involved again … I wasn’t anybody who could handle the trouble this looked like it was going to be. Somebody else needed to be told.
Felix? Yeah, but not now. I needed somebody people would listen to, not argue with for an hour first. Lord Stephen? Yeah, but I needed somebody who’d listen to me, and I didn’t think Lord Stephen would. Not now. Then all at once I thought of Lord Giancarlo. He didn’t like me, but he was a fair-minded man, about as fair-minded as a hocus could get. I knew without having to wonder about it that he’d listen to me, and he was the chairman of the Curia. Lord Stephen would listen to him.
I shifted my grip from Hugo’s wrist to his collar. “Come on, Hugo. Let’s see if you get better at spilling your guts with practice.”
I stood and hammered on Lord Giancarlo’s door for what felt like an hour before he opened it. He was in his dressing gown, his thin gray hair all up on end.
“Mr. Foxe? What on earth?”
“Sorry to disturb you, m’lord, but I’m afraid of waiting.” I dragged Hugo in and kicked the door shut.
I’d judged Lord Giancarlo right. The eyebrows went up, but he said, “Clearly you have something to tell me. I am listening.”
“Talk, Hugo,” I said, and Hugo talked. I’d told him lies about Lord Giancarlo all the way up from the Mesmerine, about how he was the meanest, toughest hocus in the Mirador, about how Cerberus Cresset had answered to him, about how he was more powerful than Felix and I’d seen him turn a man into a dog for looking at him wrong. Hugo believed it all, and I’d gotten him more scared of Lord Giancarlo than of either me or Lord Ivo. He told him everything, more even than he’d told me, details about how they’d got rid of Lady Dulcinea, about how Vey and Lord Ivo turned against Gloria Aestia and Cotton Verlalius when they realized how stupid and dangerous they were. He even talked about the plot to kill Cornell Teverius. It was weird listening to it from that side, how they’d decided to try with Cornell, along of him being both greedy and not very bright, but how he’d gotten too cocky and started shooting off his mouth, and how Lord Ivo had written to Robert to say he’d betray them before they could get him the Protectorate, and so Robert had sent Hugo down the city again. And then details about how Lord Ivo’d moved back in and it was like nothing had changed and how Hugo’d gone to see Kolkhis twice, and I remembered thinking that the Guard would know if Hugo was leaving the Mirador and wanted to just die of my own stupidity. Lord Giancarlo was scowling like the end of the world, but he took notes and asked for dates and details, and I knew he wasn’t making the mistake of not taking the information seriously just because it came from a rabbit. He got everything out of Hugo there was to get and then got his valet to run for the guards to take Hugo down to the Verpine, the prison under the guard barracks.
“I must go to Lord Stephen,” he said to me.
“You don’t need me, do you?”
“No, if you do not wish to come.”
“Lord Stephen, he ain’t exactly …”
“I understand. You have done the Mirador a tremendous favor, Mr. Foxe. We will not forget.”
“Thanks, Lord Giancarlo,” I said. I could feel my face going red. “Well, good night.”
“Good night, Mr. Foxe.” As I left, he was throwing on his clothes.
I went to Simon and Rinaldo’s suite. Them and Gideon deserved to hear first.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Simon asked as he let me in.
“Yeah, and then some.” I looked around. “Where’s Gideon?”
“He got a message from Felix and went out. Come on, Mildmay! Don’t sit on it—what did you learn from the necromancer?”
I gave them the rundown of what Luther Littleman had said, and then of what Hugo had said. Rinaldo applauded with delight when I told them about dragging Hugo to Lord Giancarlo. “I would have paid money to see the look on Giancarlo’s face.”
“It was mostly the eyebrows,” I said, and he boomed with laughter.
“What’s going to happen?” Simon asked.
“I dunno. Lord Giancarlo was gonna go talk to Lord Stephen, and I guess it depends on how much Lord Stephen believes.”
“Stephen will listen to him,” Rinaldo said. “He has hated Ivo Polydorius since Dulcinea died.”
“Why?” I said.
“There were … words spoken at her funeral that would have gotten Ivo a challenge if Stephen had been older. Gareth was fond of Dulcinea, but he never loved her as her children did. And perhaps he was already beginning to look at Gloria Aestia. He accepted Ivo’s apology, and they remained on amiable terms until Gloria’s execution. I now see why Ivo was so desirous of leaving the Mirador at that time, and why he picked that clumsy fight with Gareth.”
“Clumsy?”
“I had thought Ivo was unnerved—we were all unnerved. He said something stupid to Gareth about Shannon’s place in the succession, and Gareth exploded. Although perhaps it was genuine clumsiness. That question must have been very near and dear to Ivo’s heart.”
“So he left,” Simon said, “and then Gareth died and Stephen became Lord Protector—”
“And I suppose it must have seemed like there was very little point in returning. They had tried an open coup once and failed. Better to wait, bide their time. They must have been ecstatic when Stephen married Robert’s sister.”
“Shit,” I said. “Her kid, they could’ve done most anything they wanted.”
“Exactly. But then she died, and Stephen did not marry again, and Shannon was his heir. And the Polydorii tend to be good at waiting.”
“Mrs. Fenris said something about a fallow septad.”
“I don’t pretend to understand heretical thaumaturgy,” Rinaldo said. “But I do understand politics. Ivo would pass his schemes on—not to his wastrel son, but I’m sure there are other young Polydorii who cleave a little closer to the true line. But then Stephen announced he was getting married again, and Ivo got nervous. No one could have imagined Stephen would marry Zelda. But it gave him an excuse.”
“Powers,” I said. ‘That’s nasty.”
“That’s the Polydorii,” Rinaldo said.
Simon yawned. “If you find Gideon in Felix’s suite, tell him he can come back or pick up his things, whatever he wants.”
“I will,” I said and left. It was really Gideon I wanted to tell the story to anyways, and if him and Felix were together, I could tell it to both of them. That felt like a good idea. It was the first time in a decade or more that I’d really been happy about going back to Felix’s suite.
But they weren’t there. Felix’s bedroom door was open and everything. I stood for a minute in the middle of the sitting room sort of going, What the fuck? to myself, but then I figured that maybe Gideon’d wanted neutral ground for whatever it was Felix had to say to him, and I couldn’t blame him for that.
So I got the cards off the mantel and started laying out another round of the Queen of Tambrin. I could wait.
Even after Vincent left, I couldn’t settle. The romance seemed stiff and nonsensical, my bed uninviting. I couldn’t get that little pained smile of Felix’s out of my head.
Finally, I said to myself, “There’s nothing wrong with being worried about a friend,” found my shoes, and went to see if Felix was all right.
My nerve nearly failed me when I reached his suite. It was ridiculous, I told myself; I wasn’t afraid of Felix and never had been. I knocked.
And Mildmay opened the door.
We gave each other a good blank look, a fast silent mutual agreement to pretend neither one of us was embarrassed, and I said, “Can I talk to Felix for a minute?”
“He ain’t here,” Mildmay said.
“No?” I said, and my mind was immediately thronged with foolish images of disaster.
Mildmay saw my distress, for he added, “Off with Gideon somewhere.”
Oddly, this did not help. “With Gideon?”
The tiniest hint of a frown. “Yeah. Sent Gideon a note and all.”
“When?”
The frown was getting less subtle. “Dunno. I mean, Gideon’d gone out when I got over to their place, say, an hour and a half ago?”
“But, Mildmay, an hour and a half ago, Felix was with me. He said you’d deserted him, and he was lonely. And he left because—oh, never mind. But it wasn’t to meet Gideon. I’m sure of that much.”
“What the fuck?” Mildmay said, more or less under his breath.
“I’m trying to think of an innocent explanation,” I said tightly.
“Well, either Gideon was lying to Simon, or Felix was lying to you, or … I hate the fuck out of all of these, y’know?”
“Yes. Where would he go?”
“Felix?”
“Gideon could be anywhere.” He nodded reluctantly. “Look, Felix wasn’t … when he left me, he was …”
“He was in a mood,” Mildmay offered.
“That’ll do. Where would he go?”
“Dunno. But—you think we’d better find him, don’t you?”
I was remembering Isaac Garamond pacing my dressing room in a frenzy. “Yes.”
“Okay. Will you check around with his friends? You know, Fleur and Edgar and them?”
“All right.. What are you going to do?”
“I got another idea,” he said, grimly enough that I decided I didn’t want to know.
As for me, I’d go to Fleur Masterton and Edgar St. Rose if I had to, but I thought I’d start with Isaac Garamond.
So, you’re Felix, you’re in a mood, and you’ve got the whole fucking Mirador laid out like a quarter-gorgon whore in front of you. Where do you go?
I’d thought of the battlements right off, but even Felix wouldn’t go up there all by himself in the dark. Thought of the Arcane, seeing as how he was like one big raw twitchy bruise every time anybody mentioned it, but if he was down there I couldn’t go after him nohow. Fucking binding-by-forms. If he’d gone to one of his friends, Mehitabel’d find him, and that was better than me going round like a sheepdog who’s lost his only sheep.
And then I thought of something else. And I know I only thought of it because I’d had Strych in my head all fucking day, but, you know, it made too much sense. It’s the sort of thing Felix would do, and the thought of him down in that nasty little room all by himself gave me the creeping crawling screaming horrors. So even if I was wrong, I had to go look.
I took a lantern, because I was starting to wonder if I was crazy, but I wasn’t going to be stupid about it. Didn’t have no trouble finding my way, neither. Only ever gotten lost the once in my whole life, and there’s a couple different ways that wasn’t my fault.
So I found the door again, the one Felix had hexed shut, and there it was, open maybe a quarter inch. Fuck, I thought, because I hadn’t wanted to be right, and tried to get ready to talk Felix down from wherever he was at.
Gideon was the first thing I saw when I opened the door.
Somebody’d lugged a chair down, and he was in it, facing the door, a lantern by his feet. And he was dead. It wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t an accident. People don’t get strangled without somebody meaning it to happen. His face was swollen and dark. It took me a moment to figure out what was wrong with him, why he didn’t look like all the dead, strangled people I’d seen in my time, and then it hit me, so hard my knees buckled, and I ended up on all fours, gasping, trying not to cry and not to puke. His mouth was sagging open, but there was no tongue sticking out.
Kolkhis had taught me how to be cold, and I needed it right then, even though I hated it. Hated myself for it. But it got me back on my feet, and got me close enough to the thing that had been Gideon to take a good look.
He’d probably been dead an hour or so, though I wasn’t no expert on that end of things, and whoever had done it had taken some pains with the body. Same way you don’t get strangled by accident or because you decide to do it yourself, you don’t sit there and let somebody get their knot all tidy behind your ear. He hadn’t died with his hands folded all neat like that, neither. There was a piece of paper under them, like Gideon was a paperweight or something. I couldn’t see most of the message, but the signature was in plain view, and it was one of those words I didn’t have no trouble with: Felix.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. But Felix wouldn’t’ve killed him like this. First thought that got through that wasn’t purely obscene. Garotte’s a sneaky sort of thing, all cold and planned out in advance. Felix wouldn’t do it like that. Beat him to death, sure, or knife him even, or just fucking magic him to death. But not creep up behind him with a strangling wire.
And then I thought, Felix wouldn’t’ve brought him here to kill him anyways.
And then I thought, Mehitabel said Felix wasn’t going to meet Gideon.
And then I saw the hair tangled in Gideon’s fingers, long and red and curly, and I knew with the trouble somebody’d taken over arranging Gideon’s hands, that hair hadn’t got left there by accident either.
This was a frame-up. Somebody wanted Felix dead, and they couldn’t kill him themselves, along of the spells Cabalines all got hung on them. I was the only guy who’d ever murdered a Cabaline despite all that, and nobody’d been asking me how I did it recently. Only people who ever had asked were Felix and Gideon and Mavortian von Heber. And two of them were dead.
I bit down hard on my knuckles, and got thinking again.
Gideon wasn’t a Cabaline. They wouldn’t let him swear their precious fucking oaths. And he wasn’t real big, and he wasn’t no fighter. Easy. And with Felix wandering around like a thunderstorm, you just rig your murder a little, and hey presto! like Jean-the-Wizard always says in the pantomimes. Because who’s going to believe Felix when he says he didn’t do it? Especially when they find the body in a room only Felix knows about …
“Fuck,” I said under my breath, but hard enough that it hurt my throat. I had to find Felix, and I had to find him right fucking now. There was no time to fuck around with guessing and asking, because this room was a trap, and I didn’t figure the guy who set it was planning to just wait for somebody to come along and wonder what the awful smell was. He’d’ve found a way to spring it, and it was only the purest, stupidest luck that I’d gotten to it first.
I got myself back out into the hall, not thinking about it until I was pulling the door shut on Gideon’s dull, bulging eyes. “I’m sorry, Gideon,” I said, as fucking useless as anything in the world has ever been.
I didn’t latch the door. Left it just like it had been. Because it was proof—I mean, not great proof, but something—that some-body’d wanted the body found. And if Felix had killed Gideon, he would’ve shut the door and hexed it again, and not in no little way, neither.
You got to find him, Milly-Fox. And there ain’t no time to be nice about it, neither.
I shut my eyes for a second.
I’d been leaning away from the binding-by-forms as hard as I could for—well, for a while. Because when I was stuck in the Bastion with Simon and Rinaldo, it’d nagged at me ’til I wanted to smash my own brains out just to make it stop. And then I hadn’t wanted Felix in my head, and I hadn’t wanted to deal with it. And I’d just sort of shut it down. Felix had used it on me, but I hadn’t used it back on him. I’d even quit hearing his voice all through my dreams the way I had at first.
“Fuck,” I said out loud. “You did it to your own self, you sissy.” And instead of ignoring the binding-by-forms like a headache, I gave it some room, and all at once, something fell open in my head, and I knew where Felix was. Could’ve got to him blindfolded.
Couldn’t run, but I had Jashuki, and I was moving as fast as I fucking well could.
There was light showing under Isaac Garamond’s door, so I knocked. Knocked again harder when there was no answer. Tried the handle. Locked, of course, and I didn’t have Mildmay’s way with a hairpin.
I pounded on the door, making it shudder in its frame, and at last heard signs of life from the other side.
“Who’s there?” Isaac’s voice, and I supposed I could understand why he sounded rather cautious.
“I need to find Felix. Is he with you?”
“Cre … Meh … M-Madame Parr?”
Oh, very smooth, Lieutenant Vulpes, I thought, and repeated, a bit louder, “I have to find Felix.”
And blessedly, Felix’s voice, more muffled than Isaac’s, “I’m here, Tabby. What’s the matter?”
I wish I knew. “I need to talk to you for a minute.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“No, it damned well can’t. Now, sunshine.”
“Well, unless you want to see me in all my glory—oh. Thank you, darling.”
A few moments later, the door opened. Felix was wearing a dressing gown clearly meant for a much shorter man, with a good couple inches of his shirt showing at the cuffs; I didn’t want to know if he was wearing anything else. “So,” he said, one eyebrow up, Felix at his worst, “what is it that is so terribly urgent?”
“Have you seen Gideon tonight?”
“Gideon?” Both eyebrows up now. “Darling, surely you noticed the very messy and unpleasant end of our affair?”
“Cut it out,” I said impatiently. “Have you seen Gideon? Yes or no.”
“No, of course not.” He was frowning now, quite like Mildmay. “What’s this about?”
“Well, the thing is, sunshine, Gideon left Simon and Rinaldo’s suite several hours ago—to meet you.”
“To meet me? But I—”
“Apparently, you sent him a note.”
“I didn’t!” And that bewildered, almost childlike indignation I judged was genuine. “What in the world is going on?”
“Let me in, and we can try to figure it out.”
“What? Oh. Yes, of course.” He stepped out of the way.
Isaac Garamond’s suite looked as uninhabited as a hotel room, and Isaac himself looked dreadful, his face almost gray and sweat standing on his forehead and lip. I felt a sinking certainty that I hadn’t been wrong, that this was malice, and he was at the back of it. He’d taken the opportunity to get dressed, and he shoved Felix’s trousers at him as soon as the door was closed. Felix put them on by reflex and shrugged out of the borrowed dressing gown, still frowning at me. “Why don’t you explain things from the beginning? What does it have to do with you anyway?”
“I was worried about you,” I said, and he had the grace to look a little ashamed of himself.
I told him the whole; he listened attentively, his frown deepening, while Isaac fidgeted around the room, growing visi-bly more anxious by the second.
“And I got a servant to show me the way here,” I finished. “I’m sorry I was right.”
Isaac flinched; Felix didn’t even notice. “But how did you know?” he said, his gaze moving from me to Isaac and back again, and that was when someone began pounding on the door like the drummer for the Day of Judgment.
“Felix!” Mildmay’s voice, raw and frantic. “Felix, open this motherfucking door!”
Felix moved like a puppet toward the door, and for a useless, cowardly moment, I wanted to tell him to stop, as if there were any way we could hold off the catastrophe and grief I could hear in Mildmay’s voice.
Mehitabel’d got there ahead of me, and it wasn’t ’til a lot later that I even started wondering how. Right then, I didn’t care, except hoping she’d already explained things because I couldn’t. All I “could say—all I could get out around the stone wedged in under my breastbone somehow—was, “Gideon’s dead.”
Felix’s face slammed shut like a door. “If this is a joke—”
I said over him, “He’s dead. Somebody strangled him in Strych’s old workroom.”
“Malkar’s workroom? But I—”
“Yeah, I know. You hexed the door. Somebody unhexed it.”
“But—”
Mehitabel’s breath hissed in hard. She was looking at Mr. Garamond, and he’d gone this funny clay sort of color.
Felix—powers and saints, I couldn’t stand to look at him, because he knew he had to hold himself together, and at the same time, I could see the howl building up, and it was going to win sooner or later. But he looked at Mr. Garamond, too, and said, “Isaac? Is there something you ought to tell me?”
“Nothing. I didn’t expect—”
“Your hands were burned,” Mehitabel said. “You said it was a spell.”
“Did he?” Felix said, and it would’ve just been the tone he used when he was baiting people, except there was this edge in it like splintered wood. “Well, Isaac?”
“I don’t know anything about Messire Gennadion’s workroom. I didn’t even know he had one.” And he added primly, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“You liar” Mehitabel said, and I hadn’t even thought she knew Isaac Garamond, never mind hating him like black poison. The funny thing was, she didn’t faze him a bit. He just smirked at her, like it didn’t matter what she thought.
But there was something else. “Felix,” I said, to get his attention back on me, “whoever did it’s trying to frame you. They left stuff to make it look like it was you. Can you prove where you been all evening?”
Powers, the look in his eyes. He was about an eyelash away from just completely losing his shit. But he tried to answer me: “I was with Mehitabel. And then I came here. I don’t know what time…?”
He looked at Mr. Garamond, and Mr. Garamond said, still prim and nasty, “I have no idea. And I certainly don’t know what you might have been doing beforehand. You didn’t want to talk.’ He sneered at Felix, and I wanted to kill him for it.
But that sneer—that look on his face—I’d had Strych in my head all damn day—and now I wasn’t fighting the binding-by-forms no more, and I don’t know if that was what did it, or it was something else, but all at once the whole fucking thing came back at me, and I knew.
I probably would’ve passed out on the spot, but I had about half a grain of sense left in my stupid head and sat down. Hard. Staring at Mr. Garamond and not thinking about nothing except my breathing, because it was too hard and too fast, and there was this ugly sort of hitch in it.
“Mildmay?” Felix said, and powers, I could hear the worry in his voice, even though he shouldn’t’ve been bothering about me at all. He touched my shoulder. “Mildmay?”
My throat was locked up, and my hands were balled into fists so tight you could see every scar on my knuckles standing out against the bone. And I wrenched my head over and heaved a breath in somehow, like trying to breathe rocks and broken glass, and got out, “He killed him.”
Felix’s fingers cramped on my shoulder, hard enough to bruise. “How do you know?”
“’Cause …” Another breath, worse than the first one. “’Cause he was with Strych, in the Bastion.”
“I thought you didn’t remember any of that.”
“It just came back at me. Fuck it, Felix, d’you think I’d tell you if it wasn’t true?”
“No.” But he wasn’t thinking about me anymore. “Was spying not enough for you, Isaac?”
“Spying? What are you talking about? Good God, Felix, can’t you recognize a fanago of lies when you hear it?”
“Oh, I definitely can,” Felix said. “Did you murder Gideon?”
“Of course not!”
But he was lying. We could all hear it—even Mr. Garamond himself, because when I finally quit being such a fucking coward and looked at him, I’ve never seen a guy with more guilt on his face.
“You murdered Gideon,” Felix said, in this horrible, quiet, perfectly calm voice.
“I swear to you … I was with you!”
And that was when his nerve broke, once and for all, and he bolted for the door.
I was moving probably before he was—enough knife fights’ll do that for you—and I took him down hard. Got him pinned, twisted to look at Felix and see what he wanted, and Felix said, still in that horrible, quiet, perfectly fucking calm voice, “Kill him.”
It was a command, all the binding-by-forms behind it, and my hands were closing on Mr. Garamond’s throat before I even caught up with myself. But then there was Gideon and Bartimus Cawley and even, Kethe help me, Vey Coruscant, all dead and strangled, and I thought, clear and cold and about as calm as Felix, I ain’t doing that no more.
I said, “No.”
Mehitabel said, “Killing him won’t help anything,” and she almost pulled off her old govemess-voice, too.
“I want him dead,” Felix said, between his teeth, and Mr. Garamond was lying limp as a rabbit with his pulse hammering against my fingers, and I wanted him dead, too. I wanted him dead so bad I could taste it, copper and bile in my mouth, and it would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to just let my hands close that fraction of an inch more.
I said, “No.”
Felix’s voice went up into a shriek, “I want him dead!” and the binding-by-forms was falling on me like a wall, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I straightened my fingers away from Mr. Garamond’s throat and said, “No,” for a third fucking time.
“Damn you!” And he was there, trying to shove me aside, to get at Mr. Garamond himself, and that was when the Protectorate Guard broke down the door. Guess they figured it wasn’t no time for good manners. They yanked Felix off me, and me off Mr. Garamond, and Mr. Garamond up on his feet, and there was Thaddeus de Lalage in the middle of them, looking smug enough to bust. And I saw Esmond, who hated Felix, and Thibaud, who hated me, and just in case that wasn’t enough, there was Agnes Bellarmyn kind of hovering in the doorway.
“Felix Harrowgate,” Thaddeus said, trying to sound sort of grand and awful, but it came out spiteful and way too happy, “you are under arrest for treason against the Mirador and the murder of Gideon Thraxios.”
And they were kind of shoving us toward the door, and I was trying to turn to get eye contact with Mehitabel, along of how they were way more likely to listen to her than me, when Mr. Garamond opened his stupid fucking mouth and started shouting, “They were going to kill me! They killed Gideon Thraxios and—”
Felix turned. Me and the guards all ducked on reflex, that’s how bad his eyes looked. But I don’t think he even saw us. I can’t do magic and I can’t feel it, but I swear I felt something, like getting pushed out of the way by the biggest fucking invisible hand you ever heard of, and I know I saw it hit Mr. Garamond. He stiffened all over, lurched backwards half a step, and then fell down, not like a person but like a tree. And then I think he went into convulsions, but there were too many guards in the way, and I ain’t sure.
“Oh my God,” Thaddeus said, and at least he didn’t sound happy no more. “What did you do to him?”
“What he deserved,” Felix said like death.
I saw the look the guards gave each other, but I couldn’t move fast enough.
“Sorry about this, m’lord,” Thibaud said, not sounding sorry a bit, and thumped Felix across the back of the skull with his sword hilt.
I went batfuck insane.
Thaddeus de Lalage, that stupid, self-righteous asshole, would not listen to me. After the guardsmen had subdued Mildmay—it took six of them and two were limping and one nursing a sprained wrist when they finally dragged him out—I tried to tell him the truth about what had happened. He had his own ideas, though, and everything I said was met with the same superior smile and condescending, “Felix is a very plausible liar, you know.”
Actually, I knew no such thing. I’d watched Felix hide and evade and dance around various truths for all the time I’d known him, but I’d almost never seen him outright lie. And when he did, he did it badly. But Thaddeus wasn’t going to listen to that, either. And when I insisted, he said, “Josiah, would you escort Madame Parr to her chambers and see that she rests? I believe she’s a little overwrought.”
“What Lord Thaddeus means,” I said to the politely hovering guardsman, “is that I’m confusing him. All right, I’m coming.”
The guardsman, Josiah, was a nice young man; he obeyed orders but didn’t make a fuss about it. I caught him glancing at me sidelong once or twice, and at my door, I stopped and turned to face him. We were of a height. His eyes were brown and steady, and they seemed kind.
“Did you have something you wanted to ask me?” I said.
“You said Lord Felix didn’t do it,” he said.
“He didn’t.”
“You got proof?”
“Oh, do I ever,” I said bitterly.
“You think Lord Stephen’ll listen to you?”
I gave him my best and most dubious look, and he offered me an apologetic half-smile.
“Mildmay and me are sort of friends. And I ain’t got nothing against Lord Felix.”
I considered him a moment longer, but there was no guile in his round face, and, really, it wasn’t like I could make things worse. “I think Stephen may listen to me. If I can get to him.”
Josiah nodded once, sharply, like a man making up his mind. “Come on then.”
“You can get me in?” I said, having to break into a trot for a moment to catch up with him.
He grinned at me, a sweet, sunny grin missing half a dozen teeth. “Don’t tell nobody, but I got an in with the guards.”
In case you were wondering, the Verpine ain’t no luxury hotel. It’s deep enough in the Mirador that you can feel the Sim, and it’s all bare stone, and oh yeah, they don’t give you light unless you got somebody wanting to talk to you. And it smells just exactly like the Kennel.
It was a while before I came ’round, and it would’ve been longer if it hadn’t been for the obligation d’âme jumping up and down on me. Felix was in trouble—I mean, I knew that, because it didn’t take no brains to see it, but the binding-by-forms was telling me all about it, too. They’d done something to his magic, which I supposed—making myself think about it logically because otherwise I was just going to beat myself to death on the bars like a sparrow against a windowpane—actually made some sense. Without his magic, Felix wasn’t no kind of a threat. But the binding-by-forms didn’t care if it made sense, and it didn’t care about the bars and the walls and the locks. It just kept clanging in my head like an alarm bell.
They’d taken Jashuki—at least, I couldn’t find it, and I wouldn’t’ve left it where I could reach it if I’d been them, either—so I had all the time in the world to test my bad leg. Thanks a lot, Thaddeus. Upshot was, I could get by without a cane, but I was going to get by a lot better with one.
And, you know, every fucking time I let my guard down, even a little, I’d find myself pressed against the bars of the cell like I thought I could push my way through them or something.
The fifth or sixth time that happened, I gave up and just stayed there, grabbing onto the bars so hard the rough iron of them bit my hands. I kept seeing Gideon, the smile he’d given me when he left the Lady’s Lapdog, kept thinking that while I’d been scaring the shit out of poor, stupid Hugo Chandler, Gideon had been dying, choking and strangling with Isaac Garamond’s wire around his throat. And, Kethe, I knew just exactly how it would’ve happened, the way his fingers would have scrabbled at the wire and at Mr. Garamond’s hands, the way he would’ve twitched and struggled and then gone limp, just another sack of dead meat.
If I’d thought I could’ve run into the bars hard enough to knock myself out, I would’ve done it.
But finally—I don’t know how long it was, my time sense was fucked to Hell and back—the door at the end of the hall, the one where you could see the light around its edges so you knew you hadn’t gone blind, opened, and two guards came in, kind of half dragging and half carrying Felix between-them.
“Away from the door, Fox,” one of them said, and I backed up. They unlocked it, and shoved Felix in, and they didn’t even stop to sneer before they went back out and shut us in the dark.
Where we belonged, I guess.
I could hear Felix breathing, unsteady and harsh, and when I was sure the guards were gone, and not going to come bouncing back in or something, I said, “Felix? You okay?”
“They think Gideon was a spy,” he said in this thin little voice, and powers, he sounded lost. “I kept trying to tell them he wasn’t, and they wouldn’t listen.”
“But why would Gideon be spying? It don’t make no sense.”
“I don’t know. Some notion of Thaddeus’s, I think. They think—” He broke off, and I could hear him trying not to giggle. We both knew if he started, it wouldn’t stop ’til he was screaming. ‘They think Gideon suborned me, that he was like a spider, sitting and waiting, and I was running around finding things out for him and trying to recruit other spies. They think that’s why I was interested in Isaac. And they think … they think—” It nearly got away from him, but he fought it back down. “They think I killed him because I didn’t know any other way to get free of him.”
“How fucking dumb can you get?” I said.
“Oh, my past history more than supports the theory,” he said, his voice dry now but still shaky and still full of splinters and shards.
“You mean, because of Strych?”
“And certain … aspects of my relationship with Lord Shannon.”
“It’s still dumb.”
“Thank you,” he said, and he sounded like he meant jt.
We were silent for a minute, and I was just about to ask him if his head was okay, when he said, “Is … is this the Verpine?”
“Yeah,” I said, and tried to hide how gut-punched I felt that he had to ask.
“I was here once before.”
“Before?”
“When I broke the Virtu. They put me down here. I remember the dark.”
We were silent again, because I didn’t know what the fuck to say, then he said, “Mildmay?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think it’s dark, where Gideon is?” And, powers, his accent had gotten away from him, and his voice was barely more than breath, and he sounded so fucking lost.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said, and my voice broke. “C’mere.” We found each other in the dark, and I hugged him, and for once he didn’t go stiff or shrug me away, but hugged me back.
“I don’t want him to be in the dark,” he said into my shoulder. “I don’t want him to be afraid.”
“His White-Eyed Lady was waiting for him,” I said. “She’ll take care of him. She’ll help him rest.”
“Do you think so? Really?” He was crying, the way you learn to cry when you’re a kept-thief and you don’t dare make any sound about it. But I could feel his tears soaking into my shirt.
“Really,” I said, and held him against the dark.
Stephen did not exactly look on me with favor when Josiah had sweet-talked me past the guards on duty outside his study.
“Mehitabel, I am extremely busy, and—”
“Shut up and listen,” I said.
His jaw sagged a little, and I threw myself into speech before he could muster himself to have me evicted. “I was a spy for the Bastion. Up until about quarter of eleven tonight. No, yesterday, it must be past midnight by now.”
“It is,” Stephen said grimly. But he flicked his fingers at me to continue.
I told him the whole thing. About Hallam and Louis Goliath and Isaac, about what I’d done and hadn’t done, what I’d seen, what I knew. I laid out every piece of the puzzle, every link in the chain, and Stephen sat and listened with perfect concentration.
“Felix didn’t kill Gideon,” I said finally. “Isaac did.”
“To get Felix convicted of murder and executed.”
“That seems the logical conclusion.”
“Pity we can’t ask him,” Stephen said, his voice as dry as salt and ashes.
“Is he…?”
“His mind is gone,” Stephen said. “Whatever Felix did to him, it’s not the sort of thing you get over.”
I shivered.
“And so you may clear him of murder, but I’m afraid there’s still the gross heresy to deal with.”
“Oh,” I said. Stupidly, I hadn’t thought past Gideon.
He sighed, deeply. “There will have to be a trial. Will you testify?”
“If you’re going to kill him anyway, why does it matter?”
His basilisk stare turned me to stone where I stood. “Because it is the truth. Will you testify?”
“You burn wizards for heresy, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“God.” I wrapped my arms around myself in a useless parody of a hug. “Is there any way …”
“He’s made a man into a drooling, weeping, mindless wreck, and you’re pleading for him?”
“That same man is one you would only have executed. Do you burn spies, too, or just hang them?”
“Revenge and justice are not the same.”
“The end results look pretty damn similar,” I snapped. “And, oh, by the way, are you going to execute me? I’d like to know before I make dinner plans.”
“You haven’t committed a capital crime,” he said, quite mildly all things considered.”
“Will you testify?”
“In front of the court? Will you provide the rail for them to run me out of town afterward?”
“In front of me, Giancarlo, and one other, whom you may choose.”
I stared at him, wishing I could basilisk right back at him. “Is this because I’m sleeping with you?”
“Yes,” he said, perfectly unashamed. “And because you chose to come to me with the truth. And because I’m going to be ruining enough lives in the morning. Your Mr. Foxe was very busy last night.”
“He’s not mine,” I said. I’d heard rather more than I’d wanted to about the downfall of Ivo Polydorius and Robert of Hermione while Josiah was arguing with the guards.
“In any event, you acted under duress.” A pause, and he added with the first sign of discomfort he’d shown, “I will see if there’s anything I can do about Lieutenant Bellamy.”
Maybe Thaddeus was right. Maybe I was overwrought. Tears were suddenly burning in my eyes, in the back of my throat. “Thank you,” I said, and it came out more hoarsely than I wanted.
“There may be nothing,” Stephen said, as if trying to evade my gratitude. “Go get some rest, Mehitabel. And tell me who you want as your third witness. Oh—it has to be an annemer.”
I expected the decision to be a difficult one, but the answer was there, waiting for me. “Lord Shannon.”
Stephen’s momentarily dumbfounded expression was very nearly worth the mortification of having had to tell him the whole sordid story. The smile I gave him as I left was almost real.
I lay on my bed, unsleeping, the rest of the night, reciting Finuspex and The Tragedy of Horatio to myself to keep from having to think. A little after six, Lenore brought tea and toast and a message telling me to meet Stephen, Shannon, and Lord Giancarlo in the Attercop. A page would come at seven-thirty to show me the way.
I rose, washed, dressed, ate, all of it like a machine in one of Mélusine’s manufactories. Lenore—silent, watchful, but nonjudgmental—pinned my hair up and unearthed the black gloves I’d bought for the funeral of Corinna’s Aunt Constancy. She gave them to me, and I realized I was wearing the same dress I’d worn to that funeral, too: plain gray wool with jet buttons and an underskirt trimmed with black lace.
I wondered where Gideon would be buried.
The page was the brown sparrow-child I’d seen once before. His name—he told me shyly when I asked—was Garnet Aemorius. He had just turned thirteen, and he thought the Mirador was the most fascinating and beautiful place in the world. I hoped he’d be able to go on thinking that.
The Attercop was a small room, paneled in cherry wood. Its only decoration was the carpet, which I recognized as Lunness-make, bold in cranberry and gold and kingfisher blue. The men were waiting for me; even Shannon was dressed somberly, and Giancarlo of Novalucrezia looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. Even his eyebrows were drooping.
Stephen poured me a glass of water. I thanked him with a curtsy and then pulled myself up, assuming the swan-daughter, drawing on Edith Pelpheria and Jacobethy and every other strong-willed woman I’d ever played. Even Aven, God bless her crooked black heart. “My lords,” I said, “I was a spy for the Bastion …”
It was no less wearing to tell it a second time. I tried not to look at either Shannon or Lord Giancarlo as I spoke; Stephen’s basilisk stare was oddly comforting. When I had done, Lord Giancarlo said, “Thank you,” and Shannon got up to hand me to a chair, as he would for a real lady. He didn’t say anything, but the brief, warm pressure of his fingers on mine was message enough.
I sat, still playing the swan-daughter, while they consulted in voices low enough that I couldn’t quite hear them. At least they believed me, I said to myself.
Finally, Stephen said, “Well, we’ll do what we must.” And, to me, “Will you come see justice done tomorrow?”
“I hope so,” I said, and he gave me a tight smile for the quibble.