One of their rare moments of easygoing humor. Savedra’s throat closed. Neither of them tried to shut her out, but they didn’t need to. Fate had done that well enough.
She stood, shaking her skirts with a practiced fillip, and poured the rest of her cooling coffee back into the pot.
“Where are you going?” Nikos asked.
She leaned in to kiss his cheek, sliding deftly away when he tried to pull her close. “To visit my mother.”
Savedra and Nikos’ relationship might not be the most impolitic the Azure Palace had ever seen, but she was hard pressed to think of many others. Their houses had been bitter rivals for decades, ever since Thanos Alexios led the rebellion that overthrew the last of the Severoi kings. Not that Ioris Severos had been what anyone would call a good ruler, but that hardly mattered to the family. The last thing the Alexioi and their allies wanted was a Severos worming her way near the throne, especially the daughter of Nadesda, an archa known for her ruthlessness and wide-flung web of influence. Since Savedra moved into the palace she had narrowly avoided three poisoning attempts. Had she been able to bear Nikos any bastards she would be dead by now, no matter how careful she was or how powerful her mother.
Instead she was hijra; the third sex, in old Sindhaïn—men born in women’s bodies, women born as men, and the androgynes who were neither or both. The hijra veiled themselves with ritual and mysticism, keeping mostly to their temple in the Garden. The curious paid to see the faces of their priestesses, and paid more for their prophecies and their bodies. So Savedra’s rivals called her freak and whore—never mind that she had never taken the mark of the order—and made cruel jokes where Nikos couldn’t hear, but she would never be queen or mother to a usurper, and so wasn’t a permanent threat.
Savedra tried to let the hiss and splash of rain and wet streets drown her thoughts as the carriage bore her to the Octagon Court, but it was no use. Murder and sleeplessness left her maudlin, and the weather didn’t help. The grey veil, autumn was called, for the storms that swept down from the mountains; the same name was given to the listlessness and depression that took some people when the light and warmth vanished.
She had the use of Nikos’ coach, but it was simpler and quieter to pass the gate and hire one of the dozen that always waited to carry visitors and courtiers to and fro. The ride was short—less than half an hour before the horses stopped under the covered walk of Phoenix House and the driver scrambled to help her out. His quick appreciative glance might well have been as much for her cloak as for her face, but he didn’t hesitate over the polite milady. Her bolstered pride earned him a gracious tip, and she nearly laughed at herself.
Eight houses brooded at one another from eight sides of the court, and at the tall bronze statue of Embria Selaphaïs that stood in the center. Severos, Alexios, Konstantin, Aravind, Jsutien, Hadrian, Petreus, and Ctesiphon. Eight houses, eight families, constantly squabbling and backstabbing over land and position and trade, a web of enmities and alliances that shifted every year with deaths and births and marriages. The rain turned all the houses into glowering grey hulks, but windows in only six glowed against the gloom. The Petreoi had retired to their estates in Nemea last month to elect a new archon, and the Ctesiphon house had stood empty since the family’s head had plotted against King Nikolaos twenty-eight years ago—the attempt had cost him his life, and his house their archonate and all holdings in the city for thirty years.
The carriage rattled away and Savedra turned back to Phoenix House, her heels tapping on wet flagstones as she climbed the steps. Two guards in black and silver livery bowed and held the door for her, and a maid appeared in the foyer to take her damp cloak.
“Is my mother in?” she asked as she shrugged off heavy velvet folds. Blue silk lining flashed in the lamplight.
“The archa is in the library, milady, with Lord Varis.”
“A private conversation?”
The woman shrugged one soft shoulder. “No more than usual.”
Meaning that no one had spelled the room to silence, then, and Nadesda wouldn’t mind an interruption. “Will you have tea sent up, please, and something to eat?”
“Of course, milady.”
The smell of Phoenix House settled over her, the unique blend of stone and polish, wax and oil, the inhabitants’ favorite meals and pets and perfumes that time had ingrained into the walls. The scents of the palace were familiar now, and she still remembered those of Evharis, the estate in Arachne where she was born, but they had never been so comforting. Phoenix House had awed her as a child, with its shadows and stillness and secrets, treasure troves in gabled attics; now it was simply home.
The library drapes were pulled against the chill, and firelight and low lamps lit the room, gilding dark wood and silver sconces and warming the deep colors of the carpets and wall hangings. Nadesda and Varis sat near the hearth, a tea tray on a table between them. Nadesda glowed darkly in bronze brocade, regal as a queen in her high-backed chair. Her beauty was undimmed at fifty-three; another reassuring constant in Savedra’s life.
“Savedra, darling.” Varis stood when she entered and held out a hand.
“Uncle Varis.” She hadn’t realized until she smiled just how unhappy her morning had been.
He was actually her mother’s cousin, but he’d been a familiar and cheering presence as she’d grown up. He’d soothed her adolescent awkwardness with shopping expeditions and visits from his tailors, and taught her to bury the gangly teenaged boy she despised under careful cosmetics and deportment. And, on rare occasions when she’d thought she would go mad, with subtle illusion charms. He had taken her away from the palace on Nikos’ wedding night and gotten her thoroughly drunk.
He took her hand, jeweled rings pressing against her skin. His cheeks creased with a smile that always looked like a smirk, no matter how sincere. He resembled none of her closer relatives, being slight and bird-boned, with startling pale eyes and translucent skin. He’d begun losing his hair before she was born, and made up for it by shaving his head; it set off the delicacy of his features. Malachite powder glittered on his eyelids, and he smelled of lime and lilac and white musk when she kissed his cheek.
He wore black, which meant he must have come from the Arcanost—sober colors were his only concession to Archlight’s dour ideas on fashion. Nothing else about the sculpture of layered velvet and leather that was his coat was reserved. Not that combining chartreuse and fuchsia was the worst of his scandals by far.
“You look tired, my dear,” he said as Savedra bent to kiss her mother. “Is that Alexios pet of yours keeping you up?”
“I keep him up, Uncle. I wouldn’t be much of a mistress if I didn’t.”
“Did you ever try that Iskari massage oil I recommended? I’ve had—”
“Varis.” Nadesda’s quiet reproving tone had worked on children and archons for thirty years. “Pretend for a moment that you have the decency not to corrupt my children. Or at least the tact not to do it while I’m in the room.”
“You know I was never any good at acting, Desda. A pity too—imagine Uncle Tselios’s reaction if I’d run off and joined the Orpheum Rhodon.”
“Hah!” Nadesda’s bright laugh was one of the rare unschooled expressions that no one outside of House Severos had ever seen. Garnets and marcasites glittered as she shook her head. “Too bad you never did. We didn’t outrage the old bastard nearly enough before he died.”
“Maybe it’s not too late. I could find a necromancer to summon him back.”
Nadesda reached for her teacup and stopped when she realized it was empty. “Sit down, Vedra. What’s the matter?”
Savedra drew up a chair and sat, envying as always her mother’s perfect posture. She ought to wear more corsets. “Can’t you guess?”
One eyebrow rose. “Something to do with the note I sent you?”
With perfect timing, a diffident knock fell on the door and a maid slipped in with a new tea tray. While she laid out the dishes, Savedra wondered if sh
e ought to talk to her mother in private. Varis disdained politics, being more concerned with debauchery and thaumaturgy, but she didn’t precisely trust any member of her family with secrets. But, she decided, this was safe enough as far as intrigues went. He already knew about her arrangement with Nadesda.
When the maid had left and everyone had fresh tea—and Savedra had devoured a scone with undignified haste—Varis snapped his fingers. The orange padparadscha sapphire on his right hand sparkled with the motion and a hush filled the room like water, drowning the hiss of rain and crackle of the fire. Theatrics, for all he pretended not to be an actor. Any Severos could invoke the silence—the spell was bound into a marble ornament on the hearth—but there was no point in wasting a mage if you had one at hand.
After the silence deepened and scone and tea settled warm in her stomach, Savedra set her cup down. “Who sent the assassin, Mother?”
Varis’s eyebrows climbed. Nadesda cocked her head, tendrils of steam drifting around her face. “Who has the most to gain from the princess’s death?”
Savedra snorted. “We do, of course.”
One manicured nail clicked against her teacup. “Ah, but that’s not true, is it?”
“Can’t we skip the lessons?” But Nadesda only waited expectantly. “Fine. Even if Ashlin died and Nikos married me, I would never be queen or produce an heir. The best we could hope for would be another Severos adopted, and the other houses would fight that with all their breath.” Her forehead creased as she contemplated it more. “But other houses have marriageable daughters.” Real daughters, she didn’t say. Murder left her bitter as well as maudlin. “Daughters already slighted by Mathiros’s choice of a foreign bride for his son.” She tapped thumb against fingers as she counted the daughters in question. “Ginevra Jsutien, Radha Aravind, and Althaia Hadrian being the most obvious of those.”
“Your first example was the best,” Nadesda said. “Ginevra Jsutien was the favorite of at least four houses, and her aunt knew it. Of course, I’m sure Thea is much too clever to involve herself with assassins, or to leave any links behind if she did.”
“Thea.” Savedra shook her head. “That silver-tongued bitch.” She couldn’t stop the thread of admiration that crept into the words. “She went to the theater with Nikos just the other day. And she’s attending the boating party at the palace on Polyhymnis.”
“If the princess goes with them,” said Varis, “tell her not to stand too close to the rail.”
“What will you do?” Nadesda asked.
Savedra shrugged, not quite keeping the anger from the gesture. “The same thing I always do. Wait. Watch. Stop them.” Ever and always, the unceasing vigilance—tasting food, staring at shadows, studying every gift and visitor who came too close. It wasn’t what she’d imagined when she and Nikos had exchanged their first too-long glance across a crowded room nearly five years ago. “I should have been a whore after all.”
She only saw it because she was looking: the tightening around Nadesda’s eyes, the heartbeat-quick compression of painted lips. A mother’s pain beneath an archa’s poise.
Varis’s response was less controlled—his jaw clenched, and his pale eyes darkened with anger—but gone just as quickly. “Of course you shouldn’t have,” he said, voice carefully light. “That would be boring.” He tugged at his high sculpted collar. “Never let them forget you.”
Tea dragged into lunch, and then an hour spent gossiping about court and family, until Nadesda excused herself for an appointment and Varis became distracted by a conversation with the gardener about western herblore. Savedra took her chance to slip out quietly and return to the library. The assassin was only half her reason for visiting.
Many volumes of Severos history weren’t stored in Phoenix House, but secreted in vaults in remote properties or in the family library at Evharis. She wished she had those at hand, but there was no subtle way to visit them. For now the Phoenix Codex would have to satisfy her curiosity about the vrykoloi.
So of course it didn’t. An hour passed as she turned page after page with careful gloved fingers, squinting at the cramped scholarly hand. The book spoke in detail of the reign of Darius II Severos, including his dealings—in circumspect, politic language—with the vrykoloi, but of the vampires themselves she found little besides footnotes: Sovay’s Mathematics and Thaumaturgy, Anektra’s Principia Demonica, a monograph about blood magic by a Phaedra Severos published in 463. She pulled the Anektra off the shelf, risking a sprained wrist, but the handspan-thick volume was too daunting to open.
“Don’t tell me you’ve finally decided to study magic.”
Savedra started, cracking her elbow on the table and cursing. The silence on the room had faded, but Varis could still come and go unheard.
“It would make an old degenerate so proud.”
She snorted. This was a conversation they’d had a dozen times. The only way Varis had ever tried to shape her life was by encouraging her to take up sorcery, to test the fabled mysticism of the hijra. It was, to her knowledge, the only way she’d ever disappointed him; she had neither the desire nor aptitude for magic, and even less desire to remind people of the marks she didn’t wear.
“Not today, Uncle.” She shut the Phoenix Codex with a soft whump and stripped off the library’s cotton gloves.
Beneath his paints and powders, Varis looked tired. The skin around his eyes was delicate as crepe, the lines there deeper when he smiled. He had been gone from the city for much of the past year, and distant and withdrawn about his trips. Scandal was his specialty, but secrets ran in their blood.
“What do you know about vampires?” she asked, thinking of secrets.
He stilled for an instant, then plucked imaginary lint off one sleeve. “Not much, I’m afraid. Why the interest?”
Savedra smiled, carefully bright. “Some of the courtiers have started reading those awful penny dreadfuls. I hoped I could find something in here to impress them with.”
“Ah. Sadly, no. No one knows much about the vrykoloi, except perhaps a few who know better than to speak of it. A proper treatise or examination would make the Arcanost scholars’ teeth ache with envy, but none of them have the guts to go underground.” He waved one perfectly manicured black-nailed hand. “No one likes to get their hands dirty anymore.”
“Pity.” Savedra rose, shaking out her skirts, and reshelved the books. “I’ll have to settle for knowing looks and sly silences, I suppose.”
“Clever girl.” He tugged his collar straight again. “And now that your mother is gone, you can tell me about that massage oil.”
Savedra laughed and let herself be distracted, but a warning chill had settled in her stomach. That he lied only stung a little—she was used to her family—but that he lied now unnerved her.
What did he know about vampires?
CHAPTER 3
Kiril had given up many of his duties over the last three years, but he couldn’t prove it by the paperwork. A single lamp burned on his desk, spilling yellow light across stacked ledgers and rolled parchment and drifts of loose paper. Legal forms scribed in triplicate and foreign news and hand-scrawled notes in private ciphers. Agents who reported directly to the king still sent him copies of their reports, and he had plenty of contacts who communicated only with him. His slow slide from favor had done nothing to lessen the tide. Fallings out might be counterfeited, after all, or damaged friendships mended.
There was nothing false in his split from Mathiros, nor did it hold any hope of reconciliation. He had seen to that himself.
He glared at the two latest missives; the words blurred less than an armspan away. Lamps were bad for his eyes, the physicians swore to him, but he made no move to draw back the curtains. The day outside was rain-washed and gloomy, the autumn afternoon already dull as dusk. Neither did he reach for the spectacles folded on the corner of the wide rosewood desk. Instead he called witchlight, harsh and white.
The simplest of spells, it should have been effortless. Instead h
e felt the drain of it all the way to his bones. But it was much easier to read by.
The first letter was a report from the front. The king had not seen fit to send it to him, nor had the mage who took Kiril’s place at the king’s side, but the scribe was an old friend. For such a foolish enterprise, Mathiros had acquitted himself well enough. An armistice with the Ordozh, and only two hundred Selafaïn dead to show for it. That number might be lower had Kiril been at the front, and it might not.
Which rankles more, old man? he thought wryly, rubbing the bridge of his nose against an incipient headache. That he needs you and ignores you, or that he doesn’t need you at all?
But among the dead were forty mages, and that wasn’t a number to be shrugged aside. Kristof Vargas, Kiril’s replacement and former student, was a talented sorcerer but still cocky with advancement. Selafai didn’t have scores of battle mages to spare.
That rankled most of all. That Kiril had been set aside after long service he might forgive, but for a decade he had groomed Isyllt Iskaldur to be his successor, and Mathiros had ignored her as he ignored all of Kiril’s advice these days.
Leaving her in the city to stumble over tomb robbers, and secrets he couldn’t confide to her.
He banished the witchlight and touched both notes to the coals in the brazier, breathing in the acrid smoke of burnt parchment. The warmth eased the pain in his hands more than he cared to admit. His joints had begun to ache even before his heart failed three years ago, and the rheumatism had worsened with every winter since. Now even his magic couldn’t distract him from the pain.
It would pass. He’d endured worse.
When the last corner of parchment blackened and fell to ash, Kiril wiped the soot from his hands and rose, leaning against his chair. He didn’t need strength or magic to deal with tomb-robbing vampires, only wits and caution.
He snuffed the lamp and prepared to lie to someone he loved.
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