“Nothing. You just . . . Do you approach everything as if it was a puzzle box?”
I considered the question. “Most things, I suppose. I wasn’t trying to . . . I didn’t mean to be callous.”
“I know,” he said, and managed a smile. “Discussing funerary rites just cuts a little close to the bone.”
I was normally careful not to ask how he was, and his dream-avatar did not reflect his physical body unless he was truly ill. I said unhappily, “Are you, er, much worse these days?”
“No, it’s not that. I’m doing rather well, really. All things considered. But . . . I can’t ever forget it, either. And the celebrants at Hakko—I think they’d prefer it if I hurried up and finished dying.”
“What they’d prefer is hardly relevant,” I said and was rewarded with a better smile. “I didn’t think you were still . . . that is . . .”
“They visit if their work happens to take them near the Gardens. They’re very conscientious.”
“Oh, are they?” I knew what that looked like.
“And they—” His face twisted, and emotion suddenly flared around him; we’d both learned to dampen the Khloïdanikos’s more inconvenient effects, but his control had slipped. “They’ve started bringing their acolytes. I make a wonderful object lesson. And I can’t very well protest, can I? I don’t want anyone else killing themselves the way I—” He choked it off.
I gritted my teeth and patted his shoulder. And I resolved not to bring up the subject of ghosts again.
Mildmay
There was a Curia meeting after court. The Curia’s the group of hocuses that tells the Lord Protector what to do. That ain’t the right way to put it, of course, but it’s enough to get by on. And don’t ask me how they decide who gets to sit on the Curia and who don’t. Felix was a member, even though I think about half the Curia would rather’ve taken him up to the battlements and pitched him over. So off we went, but Isaac Garamond caught us in the hall.
Shit, I thought, feeling sick for Gideon. I leaned against the wall to take some of the weight off my leg, and waited.
Mehitabel found me a couple minutes later. “Can you meet me tonight?” she said. “Usual place?”
When they left the suite, I’d seen Lord Antony put his arm around her. She hadn’t shaken him off. I’d laid awake the rest of the night trying not to imagine what her and Lord Antony might be doing. I wondered what her voice sounded like when she talked to him, if she kissed him the same way she kissed me. I wondered what she said to him about me. Did she tell him I didn’t mean anything to her, the same thing she’d said to me about him?
“What for?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What for?”
She tried to laugh it off. “You have to ask?”
I wasn’t laughing. “Yeah, I do. What do you want me for? You can have any man you want, and we both know it. So why the fuck d’you bother with me? Got a taste for freaks?”
“Mildmay, please. Don’t—”
“Why not?” And then I said it. I’d been keeping the question back for months, not letting it out into the daylight, but there didn’t seem no point no more. “How many other men are you fucking?”
“Mildmay, I—”
“Answer me.”
“I don’t see what business it is of yours.”
I felt something tear loose inside me. I dragged her into a side-alcove and pinned her against the wall. “Answer me.”
She gave me a glare fit to kill. She was going to tell me the truth, not because I’d frightened her, but because I’d made her mad. “Three or four. I don’t keep count.”
We’d both known that knowing would only make things worse. I let go of her and stepped back. She fussed with her sleeves, like that was what mattered. I said, “I think we better not see each other again.”
Her head came up. She looked horrified. I suppose it might’ve been real. “What are you talking about? I’ve never made any secret—”
“I can’t bear it no more,” I said. “I don’t mind the sleeping around so much, but I don’t know who you are. I can’t trust you, and there ain’t no point if we don’t trust each other. Good-bye, Mehitabel.”
I couldn’t look at her no more. I went back to Felix. Him and Mr. Garamond were standing, waiting, watching me.
“What’s the matter, Messire Foxe?” Mr. Garamond said as I came up to them. “Crossed in love?”
Kethe. Does it show? “Nothing,” I said. And I was glad I didn’t have to try and smile at him.
“I’ll see you later, Isaac,” Felix said. “Come on, then, Mildmay, if you’re done with your light of love.”
I swallowed hard and went after him.
Mehitabel
First things first, I scolded myself fiercely. You will not panic. But controlling my panic felt like trying to kill a fast-moving snake with a shovel. Mildmay had always seen me more clearly than I wanted, but I hadn’t realized just how much he saw. I felt horribly naked now, knowing that all this time he’d been aware that I was acting, even if he didn’t know exactly how to articulate his awareness.
It could be worse, I said to myself and then had to stop to think of a scenario to prove it. But it could have been worse. Mildmay could see I was acting, but even his eyes weren’t sharp enough to see behind the façade. And he wouldn’t push me. That was the part he hadn’t said, although I could fill it in for myself: he had reached the point where he had either to demand the truth from me or to leave, and he had left. I wondered, a little bleakly, whether that was because he knew he couldn’t make me tell him, or because he thought he could. Either way, he’d chosen to respect my boundaries and withdraw from the battle. I was grateful to him for that, as my instinctual panic began to ebb. Grateful that he was shy, taciturn. That coercion wasn’t in his nature. That he didn’t want to know.
If I was honest with myself—and I might as well be, since I certainly couldn’t be honest with anybody else—I could admit that it hurt, too. Particularly my pride. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a man walk out on me. And it would be stubborn, silent Mildmay who had the balls to do it.
I would miss him. I didn’t love him—not the way he’d wanted me to—but he’d been a delight to listen to, once you got him started, and a virgin’s wet dream in bed. And I’d become fond of him.
“Oh, God damn,” I said and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Are you all right?”
I nearly had a coronary on the spot, not just because I hadn’t known anyone was there, but because I recognized the voice, and I didn’t need to meet Lord Stephen Teverius’s slate-gray eyes to place it, either.
I’d never been this close to Lord Stephen before; he wasn’t the sort to flirt with actresses. His bulk was impressive—more muscle and bone than fat—but it was his gaze that went through me like a skewer and made me feel oddly breathless. Like a basilisk, I thought, too dazed at that moment to know whether it was a sensible comparison or not, and then pulled myself together by main force, faked a smile, dropped a curtsy, said, “I am fine, my lord, thank you.”
“Did he hurt you?” Lord Stephen said, disregarding what I supposed had been a rather obvious lie.
“No, quite the reverse.” And Mildmay had upset me, because it came out waspish. And it wasn’t what I should have said, anyway. Well, precious little point in doing things by halves, as Gilbert says in Third Time’s the Charm, between murdering his loathly wife and dispatching her aged and equally loathly mother. I let myself laugh, a little deeper and earthier than I usually considered prudent, and it paid off, for Lord Stephen said with a reluctant twinkle, “I suppose I was asking for that.”
“I shouldn’t conduct the messy termination of my love affairs in public,” I said.
“Termination?” His eyebrows went up.
“Oh, very definitely.”
“Ah.” Something flared in his eyes before he banked it down again. “Then will you have dinner with me this evening?”
&nbs
p; And no matter what turmoil I might be in, I’d be dead before I was stupid enough to turn him down.
No sooner was I out of sight of the Hall of the Chimeras’ great bronze doors than Vulpes emerged from a cross-corridor, caught my elbow, and dragged me bodily into one of the little parlors this part of the Mirador was infested with.
“We must stop meeting like this,” I murmured crossly, disengaging from him.
He ignored it. “What did you do to Messire Foxe? And what were you talking about with the Lord Protector?”
I hadn’t seen him at all—but he was a wizard. And Eusebians had spells for that sort of thing.
“Lord Stephen invited me to dine with him tonight,” I said, betting—correctly—that that would make Vulpes forget about Mildmay entirely. He thought of a great many things he wanted me to find out—more when I told him what I’d learned from Mildmay; I finally shut him up by asking if I should get pen and paper to make a list, and I escaped shortly thereafter.
I got back to the Velvet Tears as fast as I could, and there God smiled on me at last: Corinna was in her room, masking the moth-holes in a velvet suit-coat with embroidery of dragon-flies. I halted in her doorway, breathing hard; she glanced up, then her eyes widened. “Powers, Tabby, what’s got into you?”
“I have . . . a date this evening,” I panted. “With . . . Lord Stephen.”
She stared at me, her mouth dropping open. “You’re kidding. ”
I shook my head helplessly.
“Powers and saints,” she said, awed.
I finally had my breath back. “I need a dress.”
“Oh, lovey, you sure do. Come here, and let’s see what’s what.” And she carefully anchored her needle in the lapel of the suit-coat and stood up to throw open before me the treasures of the Empyrean and the Merveille.
Mildmay
I watched the things that happened in the Curia meeting that afternoon like I was planning a hit, studying everybody’s faces and voices like if I understood them I could understand the world. Five minutes after we left the Lesser Coricopat, I couldn’t remember a single damn thing anybody’d said.
“Are you all right?” Felix said as soon as we were clear of the hocuses.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, you mean.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Suit yourself,” and we went off to the Fevrier Archive for what was left of the afternoon.
Whatever Felix was after, he didn’t find it, and dinner that night was silent like falling down a well. Felix was staring off into space like he was waiting for some answer to come walking through the door. Gideon looked like the only reason he wasn’t asking questions was being afraid Felix would answer him. I remembered that I still didn’t know what Felix had been doing the night I showed Mehitabel and Lord Antony the crypt of the Cordelii—and was she with him now?—and I didn’t blame Gideon for not really wanting to know. There’s things you can’t unknow once you’ve got a good look at them, and some of them are the kind of thing that kills love dead as stone.
When I asked, Felix let me go without so much as a raised eyebrow. He probably thought I was meeting Mehitabel, and I didn’t tell him otherwise.
What I did, because I couldn’t stand having nothing to think about but my own stupid self, was go hunt up Hugo Chandler.
I knew where Hugo lived. There was a whole gaggle of musicians living along a kind of half-floor called the Mesmerine. It was in one of the older sections of the Mirador, kind of rundown. Nobody else wanted to live there, so nobody minded if the musicians wanted to practice in the middle of the night.
I knocked on Hugo’s door, and after a moment, he opened it.
“Mildmay!”
“Hey, Hugo. Can I come in?”
He blinked at me. “Sure, I guess.” He stood aside. I tried not to limp going past him, but I don’t even know why I cared. It wasn’t like he could tell Ginevra or nothing.
"S-sit down,” Hugo said.
“I don’t mean to make you nervous,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you something.”
“No, it’s fine. Really. What did you want to ask?”
“Well, I was wondering.” Powers, I couldn’t think of a way to say it that didn’t sound like the stupidest fucking thing in the world. I did sit down—he had a couple chairs, cheap knockoffs of Ervenzian vinework from St. Millefleur. Hugo didn’t sit. “You know how when Ginevra died?”
“Yeah.”
Well, of course he did, Milly-Fox. Not the sort of thing he was going to forget any more than I was. But I couldn’t bail now. “I figure it wouldn’t’ve been worth Vey’s while to go hunt her out. Not up in Nill where Austin was. So somebody must’ve told her.”
“Yeah?” He was fidgeting around the room. I’d better make this quick, before I spooked him into a brain-strike or something.
“So I was wondering if you remember anybody asking questions. You know, like they were fishing. Or anybody new around. Or anything like that.”
He was shaking his head almost before I’d got the words out.
“Nothing like that. I’m sorry.” And then he gave me this funny little sideways look through his eyelashes. “Why’re you asking now? It’s been—”
“A while,” I said, because I didn’t want either of us doing the math. “I know. I just . . .” I wasn’t going to try to explain to Hugo about Mehitabel, and about what she’d said, and about how it’d kind of been like a kick in the head and made me start thinking again—after working so hard on not thinking for so long. “Well, it itches at me. That’s all.”
“Okay,” Hugo said, like he wasn’t sure it was.
“I’ll clear off,” I said and got up. “Thanks, Hugo.”
“Good night, Mildmay,” Hugo said, and I heard him bolt the door after he’d closed it.
“Boo,” I said under my breath at the door and went off home.
Mehitabel
Corinna’s eye for fashion was second to none; I left the Velvet Tears that evening certain at least that I was as close to beautiful as I would ever get. She had chosen a severe dress in green-black silk and dressed my hair in the stark lines of the Amadée—both utterly inappropriate to an actress of known immorality and all the more satisfying for that.
The guards at Chevalgate had clearly been told to expect me, and there was a page waiting, a skinny brown child like a sparrow, to guide me to the Lord Protector’s private apartments. I followed him through the Mirador as a swan-daughter, tall and grave and pale. Well, sallow, but it would have to do.
The page knocked at the door for me and did not bow himself away until it was answered, by a stout middle-aged man in livery. The butler, assuming the Lord Protector had such a thing.
He showed me into a small sitting room, less lavishly appointed than I had expected; the furniture was well cared for and clearly valuable, but not yet beyond the borders of “old” into “antique.” Lord Stephen rose from the depths of a wingback chair to bow over my hand in a way that the court gallants would have considered hopelessly old-fashioned—a good match for his conservative tailoring and the soberly symmetrical curls of his powdered and pigtailed hair.
There was a portrait over the mantel, a slender bronze-skinned woman, very young, with large, dark eyes and smoky-black hair; she was wearing a pale blue dress that suited her far better than the massive crimson and gold court gown of the formal portrait. Gambling that Lord Stephen would be unimpressed by small talk, I asked, “Is that a portrait of your wife, my lord?”
He glanced up at it, as if it had become part of the furniture for him. “Yes. It was painted before our marriage.”
Now there, I thought irritably, is a gnomic utterance. Was it a fact? A judgment? A regret? He seemed himself to feel that he hadn’t quite said enough, for he added, “It’s the only picture of her that does her justice.” He paused, thinking, and added, “She was very pretty, but not . . . not robust.”
“She couldn’t stand up to yards of stiffened
brocade,” I suggested, and his dark, blocky face was transfigured by a sudden smile. All those soirées, all those mornings in court, and I’d never seen him smile before.
“That’s a very good way of putting it. She was like a princess in a fairy tale, but not . . .”
“Did you love her?” I said, deliberately provocative. I wanted to know what I could get away with.
He didn’t take offense, seeming to consider the question a perfectly reasonable one. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, really. I doted on her, and I enjoyed the role of protector—ha! Didn’t mean the pun. Sorry. I love her memory, but I’m not sure I’d love her now.” His mouth quirked. “Easy to love a memory.”
I thought, without at all wanting to, of Mildmay and the torch he was still carrying for Ginevra, and I was grateful that the manservant—butler or whatever he was—reappeared just then to announce dinner. I accepted Lord Stephen’s arm to proceed into the dining room. Swan-daughter.
Lord Stephen held the chair for me, which I found more disconcerting than anything else. Actresses didn’t rate that sort of courtesy from lords, regardless of anyone’s intentions toward anyone else. And I didn’t know what his intentions were.
Two young men, also in livery, served the soup, and I decided the imaginary Vulpes breathing down my neck could just go twiddle his thumbs in the corner for a minute. I had my own priorities to deal with, and the first had to be getting a handle on what Lord Stephen wanted.
I tried a feint toward the theater, but realized, horrified, several minutes later, that he had me doing all the talking. That wouldn’t do. Well, he seemed to favor plain-speaking. I’d have to try again. “It was very kind of you to invite me, my lord,” I began, but he cut me off with another of his barking laughs.
“Nothing of the sort. I’m putting the wind up Philip and Vicky.”
“I’m sorry, my lord?”
“Beg pardon,” he said, waving a roll in a sort of negligent apology. “My sister Victoria and Philip Lemerius. I’m sure you know I’m supposed to be getting married again.”
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