He gazed at his sherry meditatively for a moment, then looked up and gave me a brighter smile. “But there are advantages, including a prodigious amount of time to read. I gather your company is putting on Edith Pelpheria?”
We were still talking literature when Felix arrived looking white and distrait like something out of a romance. He pulled himself together to be amusing, charming, but his eyes never lit, and his laugh was never quite real. I wondered what he thought of the murder of Cornell Teverius, but even if I’d been feeling cruel enough to ask, he wouldn’t tell me.
He said, rather abruptly, out of a discussion of The Singer’s Tragedy, “Are you ready, Vincent?”
A pause. Vincent blinked, and some of his immaculate coldness returned to his face. “I suppose.”
Felix nodded, stood up. “Then let’s go. I really do want to try this.” His smile was self-deprecating, but it still didn’t reach his eyes.
I insisted on going with them. Felix wasn’t best pleased, but Vincent seemed grateful in a shy, embarrassed way. I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone with Felix in this mood, either.
Despite all Mildmay’s disparaging remarks about Felix’s sense of direction, he led the way to the crypt of the Cordelii directly and without hesitation. I squashed the niggling worry about whether he would be able to lead us back so easily, and followed him and Vincent between the tombs to the candles clustered in front of Amaryllis Cordelia’s wall-vault.
Felix lit the candles with a careless flick of his fingers and quirked a grin when Vincent and I startled. “I am a wizard, after all. There’s no point in not getting any use out of it.”
Vincent was looking around uneasily, and I felt obligated to ask, “Do you see anything?”
“Not yet,” he said and moved farther into the circle of candlelight. “Very old places are . . .” He made a gesture, economical and evocative, and I was distracted for a moment memorizing it for use on the stage, the spread of his fingers, the turn of his wrist and how that moved into the set of his shoulders.
“Old places,” Vincent was saying, “are slow to wake, to warm. Some places don’t respond at all. There’s a ruined church at Arborstell that’s always cold.”
“Mikkary,” Felix said absently.
“Beg pardon?”
“It’s a Kekropian concept to do with the atmosphere—the aura, if you like—of places. I’d not thought about it being antithetical to ghosts, but it makes a certain amount of sense.”
“It does?” I said. “I would have thought the two would go hand in hand.”
Felix made a dissatisfied noise—not with me, but with himself. “Ghosts become mikkary. Oh dear, that made even less sense, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, and he laughed.
“Give me another couple weeks and I’ll be able to write you a monograph. But for now . . . ghosts are the memory of being human. Mikkary is the hatred of the memory of being human.”
“That’s probably as much as I want to understand.”
“Yes, well,” Felix said and shrugged.
Vincent said, “Tell me again what it is you want?”
“I want to figure out how you see ghosts,” Felix said. “It doesn’t just happen, you know.”
“It doesn’t?” Vincent said dubiously.
“No, of course not!” Felix started, then brought himself up short. He flashed Vincent a nervous smile I thought was calculated, and said more moderately, “You’re sensitive to . . . well, I don’t know to what exactly. That’s what I want to find out.”
“And what do you want me to do?” Vincent asked.
“Give me your hands.” Felix extended his own peremptorily, and Vincent took them. “And now—well, have you ever tried to see a ghost on purpose?”
“No, I told you. I try to ignore them.”
“Mmph. Try not to ignore them, and let’s see what happens. ”
I’d moved around to where I could see Vincent’s face, and from the look he gave me, he couldn’t tell if Felix was joking or not. I shrugged back; I couldn’t tell either.
And then for a while we stood, unpseaking. Felix’s head was bent over his and Vincent’s hands; Vincent was watching the darkness beyond the candlelight, and eventually he said, sounding almost surprised, “There’s a lady.”
“I thought there might be,” Felix murmured without raising his head. “Does she remember who she was?”
“Amaryllis Cordelia,” Vincent said promptly. “She was the lover of kings. She was almost a queen. She died by treachery and poison.”
“Oh God,” I said, remembering the corpse’s stiff claws and staring desiccated eyes. “Strychnine.”
“Old herbals call it St. Grandin’s Kiss,” Felix said, and then to Vincent: “Does she remember who killed her?”
“The court poisoner,” Vincent said, and I said, “Grendille Moran.”
Felix glanced at me over his shoulder. “You’re positively a fountain of knowledge tonight, Tabby.”
“You’re such an asshole. Stephen was playing tour guide.”
“Oh my,” said Felix. “And to think I missed it.”
“Have you seen what you wanted?” Vincent said sharply.
“What? Oh. Yes. Rather.” Felix let go of Vincent’s hands.
“Then may we please leave?” Vincent’s tone was an odd combination of plea and demand.
“You don’t care for the ambiance?” But Felix’s fingers flicked out again, dousing the candles and calling his eerie green will o’ the wisps into being instead.
“No,” Vincent said. “I don’t. And if we stay, I think some of the others may start to become restless.”
“Then by all means,” Felix said and waved us ahead of him out the door—which I noticed he was careful to close behind him as he emerged.
We climbed the white marble stairs, and I thought we all breathed a little easier at the top. Felix started back the way we’d come with apparently perfect confidence. After a minute or so, he said, “So, Mehitabel, tell us about Grendille Moran.”
“You make it sound like there’s something to tell. Stephen said she was the court poisoner under Laurence. Her suite was somewhere near mine, and she was beheaded there.”
“History in the Mirador,” Felix said to Vincent’s wince of revulsion. “Did Amaryllis know who, er, commissioned her death?”
“If she did, she’d forgotten. She remembered an astonishing amount as it was. More than most.”
“Really?” Felix seemed pleased.
“Does that fit in with your theories?” I asked curiously.
“It might. Vincent, how would you feel about another small experiment?”
“What this time?” said Vincent, and I wished I could believe there was any mockery in his resignation.
“I have a great fancy,” Felix said, “to talk to a court poisoner.”
“You realize it’s unlikely anything useful will come of it.”
Vincent was right; I didn’t like the febrile light in Felix’s yellow eye, or the dreaminess of the blue eye. “Just an idea I’ve got,” he said.
“Not tonight,” Vincent said. “I have to get back.”
“No, of course not tonight. But tomorrow?”
“Felix, I don’t—”
“You’re probably right, and nothing will happen. But come to Mehitabel’s suite anyway, and we’ll talk about it.”
“All right,” Vincent said, his gaze dropping as if intransigence were too heavy a burden. “I’ll get away when I can.”
“Marvelous,” Felix said.
We said nothing more until, astonishingly, Felix had brought us back to my rooms, where Vincent murmured “Good night,” and left.
Felix sighed. “At least it’s time he doesn’t have to spend with Ivo Polydorius.”
“Do you know Lord Ivo?”
“Only by reputation. He’d packed up bag and baggage and left the Mirador before Malkar brought me here, a chronological serendipity of which I have often been glad. He is not a nice man, an
d I have a horrible feeling that he and Malkar would have been bosom friends.”
“Why does Vincent put up with it?”
“What else could he do? There isn’t much market for whores in their thirties.” The vulgarity jarred me, and I saw that bitter whiteness had come creeping back into his face.
“Felix, are you all right?”
“Me? I’m fine. What is there in my life to complain about?”
I refused to be drawn, saying only, “You look tired.”
“Tired I grant you. I’m going home to bed. Enjoy your evening, Tabby.” A barbed wish from Felix, but I let him go with a simple good night. If he was looking for a fight, he was going to have to look somewhere else.
Mildmay
Let’s be frank. Except for court—a nightmare and I ain’t saying another word about it—I spent the day hiding, down in the levels of the Mirador where nobody lived but rats and spiders and feral cats. Nobody was going to want to talk to me, and I didn’t want to see the difference in people’s faces. There was nobody I could think of in the Mirador who wouldn’t care, nobody who wouldn’t think that what they knew made me somebody different. Maybe it did make me somebody different, but if so, that’d happened a long time ago and it wasn’t Cornell Teverius had done it, neither. It was a nobody named Bartimus Cawley.
Cawley had been a neighborhood boss in Pennycup, one of the septads of unimportant little crooks that keep the Lower City running. Cawley had been stupider than most, a pigheaded, greedy prick without the basic smarts to understand when he was in over his head. He started pushing the boundaries of his half-centime kingdom, taking over a couple guys to the south of him, and then he thought he knew what he was doing and he did two stupid things at once. One was he started pushing into Scaffelgreen. The other was he started expanding his line of business. From being a fence and a shylock and a part-time extortionist, he thought he’d hit the big time and be a drug dealer.
Drugs are a pretty brisk trade in the Lower City, between phoenix and spiderweb and roseblood, and the sick part is that there really is always enough business to go around. But Bartimus Cawley didn’t just want to deal. He wanted to be a big mover, what dealers call a spider, and he didn’t have enough sense to see you couldn’t start off at the top. So he knocked over Pennycup’s biggest spider and set himself up in business. For a decad or two, he probably thought he got away with it.
But the guy he was pushing in Scaffelgreen was bigger than he thought, and meaner, and the drug dealers were pissed off, and somebody knew Kolkhis and knew she had another assassin coming up—and maybe owed her a favor. Bartimus Cawley was such a fuckup, I guess they figured they could stand the risk. If Kolkhis couldn’t take care of him, somebody else could.
I was a couple months past my second septad. My face had healed up as well as it was going to—the scar was starting to go from bright red to dull white, which was better in a sad sort of way—and Kolkhis had been training me to kill people instead of just robbing them blind. I wasn’t the first kid she’d trained that way. When I was little, her assassin had been a girl named Lettie Harbinger, but Lettie got careless and got dead when I was still about two and a half indictions away from Jenday and his knife. Kolkhis hadn’t picked anybody out after Lettie died, and we’d figured she was waiting for somebody in particular to get old enough to do it. I’d never thought she’d been waiting for me, and I still ain’t sure she was. But she’d figured out she could make me do whatever she wanted, and maybe that was all the particular she needed.
So she’d trained me up good, and she sent me out to kill Bartimus Cawley. I guess as far as first targets go, Cawley was about as easy as you could ask for. He was stupid and he was fat, and I didn’t have no trouble getting to him or getting him dead. There wasn’t even a moment where I thought I couldn’t do it or nothing like that. I climbed up to his window—second storey, he was at least smart enough for that, but what good does that do you against a cat burglar?—found him in bed, snoring like five alligators in a fight, and got a garotte around his neck without him even knowing I was there. It was only afterward, standing there staring at his purple, swollen face, that I thought, You can’t take that back. I could be sorry now if I wanted to be—and I thought maybe I was—but it wasn’t going to make Bartimus Cawley less dead. Nothing was going to make Bartimus Cawley less dead, and it was my fault.
I went back out the window, went back to Britomart and told Keeper I’d done what she wanted. Then I did some other things Keeper wanted—any successful job made her horny, same way the sun rising makes the world full of daylight—and it was only when she was asleep that I crawled out of bed and went somewhere private and cried until I puked.
But then Keeper was so pleased with me that I thought maybe it was a good thing I could kill people, and we got more commissions, and people started calling me Mildmay the Fox and I started liking it. I got to where I was proud of killing people, proud of being able to get at people nobody else could get at, being able to kill people in ways that nobody else could manage. I kind of lost track of what it meant, that thing I’d understood about Bartimus Cawley, who was in a lot of ways not worth my caring.
But it came back around and bit me, the way stuff you don’t think about right most always does. It wasn’t somebody I killed that did it, either, although Kethe knows what I did to Griselda Kilkenney should’ve made me stop and think. It was stupider than that. It was the way Keeper said “Milly-Fox.”
Now, I’d always hated that nickname, which she started using within two days of people starting to call me Mildmay the Fox. But it wasn’t until I was halfway to my third septad that the way she said it started to bug me. I’d tried and tried to pretend to myself that it was, you know, loving, that if she’d known how I felt about it, she would’ve quit, but one day—I don’t even remember what she said—it hit me that there wasn’t no love in her voice. Nothing but meanness.
At first I’d been pissed off, and I lay awake half the night imagining fights with her I’d never be brave enough to go through with, not if I lived a septad of Great Septads—what right did she have to sneer at me? I was Mélusine’s top assassin. But then, somewhere around the ninth or tenth hour of the night, when all the thoughts in my head had started to go in ruts, and it was eating further and further into me that Keeper wasn’t proud of me, and she didn’t love me, and I didn’t know what I could do to make her love me, make her proud of me, I started thinking maybe she was right. Maybe there was nothing to be proud of in being the city’s best assassin. Sure, I could kill people, but plenty of people died every day without my help. And, I mean, the people I killed were dead, and it was my fault they hadn’t gotten to live any longer, and what the fuck was the good of that?
And then I thought, Sacred bleeding fuck, Milly-Fox, have you been killing people all this time because you thought it would make Keeper love you?
That was what did it, right there, although it took me a lot longer to get enough guts together to walk out. I might be good at killing people, but it wasn’t nothing to be proud of being good at, and it wasn’t nothing I wanted to do when I looked at it head on. I’d done it because Keeper wanted me to, and that was a shitty reason. What was worse was that Keeper didn’t care that I was doing it for her. I would have died to please her, and it was hard to realize that I couldn’t please her, that nothing I could do would ever be good enough, and she hadn’t even fucking noticed that I was trying.
So I’d stopped. I don’t suppose cat burglary was any great moral victory, but at least nobody was dying no more. It had taken me a long time to see how much of myself I’d killed along with Bartimus Cawley and Griselda Kilkenney and Cornell Teverius and all the rest of them and how much of that was just as dead as they were. There was a lot of stuff in myself I couldn’t bring back to life by saying sorry, either. Which I figured was about what I deserved.
What I hated most was the way the assassin wouldn’t fucking lay down and die. I kept saying I was done with him, and it was like th
e world was just going out of its way to prove me wrong. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t the guy who’d killed Cornell Teverius, even if the person I’d been when I’d done it wasn’t the person I wanted to be anymore, and it was that person, the assassin, that everybody saw when they looked at me. And every time I saw that fucker in their eyes, I hated him more.
Gotta put your money where your mouth is, Milly-Fox. You want to stop being that guy, you gotta stop. No fucking back-sliding.
I knew what I really meant, even if I didn’t have the guts to say it outloud to the spiderwebs. No more giving into Felix. Make him use the binding-by-forms, and make him use it hard. Because I knew that was the real problem. I didn’t kill for myself—never had. I’d killed for Kolkhis, and then I’d killed for Felix. And it wasn’t the killing I couldn’t quit, neither. It was the doing what I was told.
You know how sometimes you can be going along and do something or say something, and suddenly you know yourself? I mean, it’s like you’re looking at somebody else, and it’s just so fucking clear you want to hit something.
I sat down right where I was and made these noises like a coyote having a conniption fit in a sack, and I can’t tell you if I was laughing or screaming or maybe both. It was a long time before I could get myself upright again, too, and I was glad there wasn’t nobody around to watch.
Because fuck me for a half-wit dog. People’d kept asking me why I’d let Felix cast the obligation d’âme on me, and I’d kept giving them these shitty answers, and all the time the reason had been right fucking there.
Why’d I asked Felix to cast the obligation d’âme? Because let’s keep that straight, too. I hadn’t let him. I’d asked him. And why? Because I’d needed somebody to tell me what to do, and I’d wanted it to be him instead of Mavortian von Heber. Or Kolkhis.
And boy, don’t that just show I don’t have no business making decisions in the first place?
So I could put it all off on Felix. Just do what I was told and not have to think about it. Not have to be responsible for who I was. That’s why I’d done it. That’s why I’d asked Felix to cast the obligation d’âme on me.
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